An Interview with Justin FinchFletchley
by ajarntham
Summary: Ten years after the defeat of Voldemort, Lee Jordan asks what life was like during the Death-Eaters' reign for the Muggleborn son of a prominent Tory family, and what he learned as a member of the commission which investigated how they came to power.
1. Chapter 1

LEE JORDAN: Good evening to all our devoted listeners, you're tuned to WWN, the Wizarding Wireless Network, as we continue commemorating the tenth anniversary of Voldemort's fall. Today on "Many Rivers" my guest is Justin Finch-Fletchley: veteran of the Battle of Hogwarts, member of the Portius Commission, and a longtime advocate for Newblood rights. Justin, welcome to the show. It's been a while, hasn't it?

JUSTIN FINCH-FLETCHLEY: Yes, since the last DA reunion, I believe.

LEE: Life treating you well, I hope?

JUSTIN: Splendidly, thanks. And yourself?

LEE: I ask the questions here, Finch-Fletchley. This is hard-hitting interrogative radio, this is. [Laughter.] Seriously, Justin, thank you for being here. We are of course recalling the day on which Tom Marvolo Riddle slithered off his mortal coil, but we're going to take you back a little further to start, we're going to start with the Death Eaters' takeover of the Ministry, in August of 1997. The beginning of a period of terror for most Muggleborns – excuse me, Newbloods, old habits still die hard --

JUSTIN: That's all right.

LEE: -- but you were spared most of that.

JUSTIN: Most of it, yes. I didn't have to go on the run for my life, because of my father's status, in the UK. He had been Deputy Minister for Defense in the John Major cabinet, the one in office before the Blair administration, which was in power in 1997.

LEE: If I understand, then, your father was a Tory, but the UK government in 1997 was Labor, right, their enemies. So why would your father still have had enough pull to protect you?

JUSTIN: Well, it's an exaggeration to call them "enemies," especially in matters of national defense and foreign policy, which was my father's area; on those points, there really isn't any essential difference between the parties. Actually it wouldn't have surprised anybody if the Blair government had let my father stay in office. And everybody knew he would be a likely cabinet minister the next time the Conservatives came in.

LEE: Back to our question, then: tell us what happened on the day of the coup.

JUSTIN: I was at home, I had been trying to keep up with events, keeping in touch with friends through owl and through the floo, and on this day I tried to call Ernie on the floo --

LEE: Ernie Macmillan.

JUSTIN: -- yes. And I had thrown the powder in and made the call, when I got a response I had never gotten before; the message – everybody knows this one now – message hanging in the air, in green letters, saying "This floo passage is busy. Please wait just a moment, and service will return." And my first response was to laugh, since it seemed like something Arthur Weasley would have come up with after studying the answering machine. So I sat and waited, like – I suppose pretty well all the Newbloods who got that message that day just sat and waited.

LEE: Until somebody came through the floo.

JUSTIN: And that would be the last anybody ever saw them again.

LEE: But you never saw anybody come through the floo.

JUSTIN: I didn't remember seeing anybody come through the floo. What I remember is, it seemed like the next moment, I was getting shaken awake by my father, who said he'd had an urgent message from the Prime Minister, who wanted to see both of us, immediately. Because he'd – Blair had just been contacted on behalf of the new Minister for Magic, Pius Thicknesse, to set up a meeting, and Blair wanted somebody with him who understood what was going on in magical Britain.

LEE: We'll come back soon to the story of that meeting and what it led to for you, but I wonder if you can talk about what you found out, later, about what happened right after you tried to make that floo call.

JUSTIN: Yes, the first time I suspected that there was something more to that story, that event, was a couple of months after that, at a time when it was clear to everybody what the Death Eater government was up to, especially with the Newbloods. But I assumed, as we've been talking about just now, that I was safe, that they wouldn't dare try anything with me because I'd been at meetings with Blair and Thicknesse, it would be unthinkable to just snatch me off the street or out of my house. Well, this one day, I was at home with my sister Samantha, who was fifteen years old and non-magical, and she was on the phone – she'd just bought a computer, she was having some difficulties with it, and she had called the help line. And after a minute or so she got tired of holding the phone, so she put it on speakerphone --

LEE: Remedial classes in Non-Magical Studies are now available for all wizards and witches who still don't know what a speakerphone is. Sorry, go on.

JUSTIN: And I heard the recorded voice on the speakerphone saying "All our counselors are busy assisting customers. Please wait, and we will get to your call as soon as possible." And.... a green haze appeared before my eyes. And I started screaming, "Get off the phone, Sam, get off the phone, hang up NOW!" Well, naturally she just stared at me in shock. I shoved her aside and cast _Reducto!_ on the phone. Again and again. [Pause.]

LEE: You must have realized that these were symptoms of having been through a hasty obliviation.

JUSTIN: I gathered that, and that it must have been something – having to do with the floo call, and the "Please wait" message, and what must have happened after that, the part before my father woke me. That I'd lost I don't know how much time – I didn't remember when I'd called Ernie or when my father got me, maybe it was a half hour, maybe three quarters of an hour, something along those lines. And that meant I must have been... caught and released. Then had the memory charm, of course. And what happened in the interval couldn't have been pleasant, given my reaction to Sam's phone call, obviously. But I had no apparent way of knowing what, or who, or why they took me back.

LEE: That would be enough to drive most of us around the twist.

JUSTIN: It pretty nearly did, I don't mind saying.

LEE: You did get some answers though, after the war was over.

JUSTIN: Some. I had been snatched. That was something I had – I thought I had accepted as a fact, but actually reading this brief, casual summary of it -- "BL took JFF, contrary to settled orders; returned, obliviated after confr. with Y" -- it's a bit of a shock to the system.

LEE: Where did you read it?

JUSTIN: Severus Snape's diary. Which was far and away the fullest and most reliable source we have for what went on behind the scenes during that year.

LEE: And we'll be coming back to the Snape diary, when we talk about your time on the Portius Commission. What did it tell you about what happened to you?

JUSTIN: Backing up a bit, within the Death Eater ranks, there were two factions when it came to dealing with the non-magical world. Yaxley's group wanted to soothe the Muggles, avoid conflict, at least for the moment, until they had solidified power. And this was the side that persuaded Voldemort.

LEE: Which answers the question many of us had, about why he didn't immediately crown himself publicly as one would expect from a good megalomaniac.

JUSTIN: And it still seems a bit out of character.

LEE: Doesn't it, though! I would have liked to be at the meeting where Yaxley first suggested it. 'Maybe you'd better take a back seat for a while on this one, old chap, keep out of sight and let cooler hands carry the business; we wouldn't want the Muggles to get their backs up, would we?' Must have been one hell of a presentation.

JUSTIN: And the other faction, which rebelled against the idea of appeasing the filthy Muggles, were looking for a way to start something which would force a fight. Like snatching the son of a prominent UK political figure, though he was – I was – on the official 'hands-off' list. But according to Snape, the moment I showed up at Malfoy Manor, an urgent call went out to Yaxley, who put in an urgent call to Voldemort, who sent back the message to stop whatever amusing activities they were pursuing and take me back.

LEE: You know what that makes you, right? You're the only person in history who can say, "Voldemort saved my life."

JUSTIN: I know.

LEE: You're the one great exception to a universal law.

JUSTIN: I know. It's terribly creepy to think of it. In superstitious moments I wonder if it means I've been given a kind of dark mark.

LEE: And the no-compromise faction was led by...

JUSTIN: Bellatrix Lestrange. Who was my personal captor. For maybe half an hour, maybe a little more. You can imagine what Lestrange might do in that time to a little Mudblood queer from Dumbledore's Army. And I have imagined it, many times. Especially after hearing what happened to Hermione. [Pause.] But she's beyond interrogating, and memory recovery would be too risky, so I presumably will never know what happened. And one naturally asks oneself, how – how I stood up, how I handled it. I always wonder, was I brave and defiant, or did I fold and scream and plead. And, of course, how exactly did she, use this opportunity? Snape had no details there.

[Pause]

LEE: I have to imagine that she used... sarcasm.

[LAUGHTER]

LEE [cont.]: Dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos...

JUSTIN: ... puns, parody, litotes, and satire.

LEE: You're listening to Ethel the Frog – no, actually you're listening to "Many Rivers," our guest is Justin Finch-Fletchley, and we'll be back in a minute.

* * * * *

LEE: Let's pick up again on your role with the UK ministry during the war. You and your dad have been summoned to Downing Street...

JUSTIN: There was actually another turn of the screw after that. Just as we were heading out the door, I got an owl from Professor Sprout, which naturally I opened right away. And it said "GET OUT NOW." We had a plan in place to hide or evacuate the Newbloods if worst came to worst, and there was a route I was to take, a safe house to get to, and so forth. By the way, I think it's most unjust that Amos Diggory only got Order of Merlin Second Class for all he did in this. He must have saved at least a dozen lives, at great personal risk.

LEE: But obviously you didn't take advantage of all that planning. Why not?

JUSTIN: I suppose, the way I was brought up, if the Prime Minister calls on you, you owe it to your country, it would have been shameful to run out on that. My father is always saying the call of duty runs in the Finch-Fletchley blood, and I just couldn't imagine telling him sorry, he had to go by himself, I was heading to France. So I told him it was just a note from my professor about school books for the coming year, and, we went. The meeting itself.... Thicknesse gave everybody bland assurances about his desire for good relations with the Muggle world, but he deflected any questions about whether they were going to continue the battle against Voldemort, and just hinted that his government might have some 'different areas of emphasis' from Scrimgeour's.

LEE: They asked you to the meeting, they must have asked for your opinion at some point. After Thicknesse left, obviously.

JUSTIN: They did, so I read out the note from Professor Sprout, and explained what it implied. My father – after we were alone, without the PM's people around us – he gave me a dressing down, about lying to him about the letter, but I don't think his heart was in it. He was more pleased that I'd managed to make such an impact at my first, bit of adult politicking. But even if I hadn't been there, it would have become clear fairly quickly what kind of regime Thicknesse was fronting for. They got the Daily Prophet at Downing Street, they read the notices about the new laws, about people being arrested for "stealing magic."

LEE: How did the Blair ministry treat you in general – because you did attend many conferences after that, right? Did they cast those quick suspicious glances when they thought you weren't looking? Make broomstick jokes? What?

JUSTIN: No, nothing like that. I think my family name carried away a lot of that problem, or what might have been a problem. It is a well-known name, we've been in positions of authority and public service for many generations, it probably seemed unthinkable that a Finch-Fletchley could have any, could possibly be less than completely committed to our side.

LEE: "Our" side being... the UK, the non-magical British?

JUSTIN: Oh, now--

LEE: You know where I'm going with this, Justin, because it's the question most asked about Newbloods--

JUSTIN: And I've answered it many times, as you know, the 'dual loyalty' question. So I'll repeat myself: why limit it to two? We all have loyalties to family, to region, to house, to church, to lovers; our loyalties are all much more divided than just 'dual.' I live in wizarding Britain, I work in wizarding Britain, I obey the laws of wizarding Britain. That doesn't make me indifferent to what happens to my magicless relatives. We're all willing to live with divided-- with multiple loyalties, when it comes to a Weasley or a Longbottom or a Potter, so why not to a Creevey or a Finch-Fletchley or a Granger?

LEE: But your situation was different, Justin. You were taking part in high-level talks to decide what kinds of incredibly destructive weapons non-wizards might be launching at targets in the wizarding world.

JUSTIN: If you're saying that no pureblood wizard would have done the same, that a pureblood would have disdained, felt dirty, using Muggle weapons, even to fight Voldemort --

LEE: No, no --

JUSTIN: -- then I'd have to say, I think you're very wrong; but if you were right, then so much the worse for the pureblood wizard.

LEE: It isn't that they were 'dirty' weapons, it's the fact that they're foreign weapons. They belong to a nation that's following its own interests, not ours.

JUSTIN: That's what happens in alliances. As far as I was concerned, the resistance to Voldemort was the legitimate government of Wizarding Britain, Kingsley Shacklebolt was the leader of that resistance, and there was an alliance between the Shacklebolt government and the Blair government against Voldemort.

LEE: Well, we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit – but if Shacklebolt hadn't come to Blair, on behalf of the Order of the Phoenix, and you were the only wizard in the room at those meetings, wouldn't you have still helped Blair and the UK military?

JUSTIN: I would have helped them to overthrow Voldemort, which would have been for the best for witches and wizards, I would say, not just for non-magicals.

LEE: But Justin, the UK government was planning to do more than just "overthrow Voldemort," they were going to use some weapons which didn't discriminate too well between light and dark wizards.

JUSTIN: That's true. And we can debate the right and wrong of that, and my part in it, and Minister – Kingsley Shacklebolt's part in it. But anything that I was part of, I would have done the same if the shoe were on the other foot. If the Downing Street government had been kidnapping and murdering witches, I would have worked with a wizarding government to stop it. I would not have helped them to enslave the UK, and I wouldn't have helped the UK government enslave wizards.

LEE: Not intentionally.

JUSTIN: Well how – what can I – I wasn't going to run off and avoid any involvement because I might end up unintentionally doing harm.

LEE: No, obviously not. Let's return to the story then, and we'll begin to fill in more details as we go. Kingsley Shacklebolt, who had been at Downing Street all this time as an undercover agent sent by Scrimgeour, now removes his cover and offers to act as a liaison between the UK and the Order of the Phoenix.

JUSTIN: And he was greeted quite skeptically. My father asked whether I could vouch for him, and I couldn't. I didn't know anything at the time about the Order of the Phoenix, the only students who knew about that were Harry, and Ron, and Hermione, I think. And the only thing I knew about Shacklebolt was that he had been one of the Aurors who went in to try to arrest Dumbledore, on behalf of the Fudge crew. Kingsley tried to tell me about conversations he'd had with Harry, on the theory that Harry might have shared this with the D.A., but of course he hadn't. So I was really in no position to assure anybody about Shacklebolt's true loyalties. I asked him if Professor Sprout could vouch for him, but she wasn't in the Order. Professor McGonnagal was, though, and she was able to get away from Hogwarts long enough to come and assure us, and I was able to assure the cabinet that Professor McGonnagal was trustworthy, so.... That was my basic role in the war, really, I was a kind of assurance policy. Not a terribly glorious role.

LEE: But a very useful one. What else did you and Shacklebolt do, before the battle at Hogwarts?

JUSTIN: Mostly, Kingsley went around military installations to make sure Voldemort hadn't placed any of his people there, or put any of the pilots or soldiers under _Imperius_. And I was – the unspoken assumption was that I was there to make sure that Kingsley didn't do anything of the sort either. Particularly, there was one flight crew which was constantly monitored, kept isolated, because they were on 24-hour call in case Voldemort was located, they were supposed to attack the location with cruise missiles. But we were never able to get firm enough intelligence.

LEE: Just as well, because even if you had destroyed his body....

JUSTIN: Of course we didn't know that, didn't know anything about the horcruxes.

LEE: Because Dumbledore had sworn Harry to secrecy.

JUSTIN: And this is one of the many cases which has one wondering, why did Dumbledore do it that way? Offhand, it would seem, if this was the kind of information that Voldemort was desperate to keep secret, then – by virtue of that fact, it should mean, that's information that Dumbledore should want to make generally available, shouldn't it? I know I'm not a fraction as wise and experienced as Dumbledore, but still...

LEE: You know Mandy Brocklehurst, right? of Ravenclaw?

JUSTIN: Sure.

LEE: She's been working for the last few years on a book project, "The War Strategy of Albus Dumbledore," and she once said to me "This is either going to end up as the longest book in wizarding history or the shortest, because either it will consist of a never-ending series of incredibly subtle and involved decision trees that will have us all marveling at how much thought went into them, or I'm going to throw my hands up and say 'I don't know what the hell he was thinking.'"

JUSTIN: [laughing] I sympathize, I do.

LEE: We're going to pass over most of the next year now, and we come to May 5, 1998.

JUSTIN: Well, I was contacted by Kingsley Shacklebolt, who had been contacted by Professor McGonnagal. who said Voldemort was coming to Hogwarts and they needed every wand they could get. That set certain things in motion at Downing Street --

LEE: We'll talk about those things in detail, later in the programme. The rest of the story, after we all arrived at Hogwarts, is too well-known to need much retelling, but everybody remembers something that struck them differently. What was your most vivid memory?

JUSTIN: Seeing Voldemort for the first time. And the last time of course, thankfully. We were lined up to fight, and then there was the announcement that Harry was dead, and we could see Hagrid first, with his burden, then all the Death-Eaters advancing, still too far away to make out any individuals even if they didn't have the stupid masks, but there was one of them that – didn't look right. As they got closer, I realized what the matter was: this one chap wasn't walking, like the rest of them. He was hovering. And he was the one who was speaking, so I thought, That must be him, that's He Who Must Not Be Named. And the bragging and lying went on, and he kept hovering. As it went on, the fear started getting burned away and replaced by disgust and rage --

LEE: At what he was saying?

JUSTIN: Yes there was that – we all knew he was lying about Harry running away, that was almost too pathetic a lie to get angry about, but even more by that, that – ridiculous hovering. As if he were saying, "Observe, pitiful mortals, how my feet are not sullied by this gross earth," and -- I know this sounds like the sort of thing people make up after the enemy is safely dead, how they would have told him off but good if they had the chance – but I'm willing to take an oath that I was just about to shout "Oh, get on with it. you bloody drama queen!" when Neville made his move.

LEE: Imagine how different history might have been if you had said it first.

JUSTIN: I would rather not. [laughter]. But you know, the hovering was part of – there was a fascinating story behind this which practically none of us knew about until after the war. Again, it's something we get from Professor Snape's diary. He writes about how the Dark Lord he first knew – Voldemort version 1.0, let's say – was terribly awkward in movement, shockingly so for somebody who wanted so desperately to strike terror into the hearts of friend and foe. Whereas, from Professor Dumbledore's description, the young Tom Riddle was remarkable for his grace and precision. And Snape, when he worked his way into Voldemort's confidence, discovered the reason: when he was just out of Hogwarts, Riddle had placed a series of spells on himself, immensely difficult and dangerous spells, which basically made him insensible to pain.

LEE: What an advantage in any duel!

JUSTIN: And that naturally makes one ask why more wizards don't try it, and the answer is, well, two answers: first, again, it's tremendously difficult magic, you need to be enormously powerful to do it, and more than that, you have to be able to concentrate for a long, long time as the spell carries essentially over every nerve ending, which takes not only power but extraordinary strength of will. Secondly, there's the side effect, which is known from non-magical medicine when people are born sometimes without the natural pain receptors; the motion of your limbs becomes distorted, because it's the feedback from pain which keeps us from twisting them into unnatural positions and leaving them there. That's what happened to Voldemort. And after his re-birthing, Voldemort version 2.0 decided to simply limit his motions as much as possible, because he was paranoid about the appearance he created. So he never walked if he could apparate, or fly, or hover. And another thing you notice, if you ever look at pensieve memories of Voldemort: he never blinks.

LEE: Reptilian chic. [Laughter]

JUSTIN: That, and not feeling pain, he didn't feel the eye irritation which sets off the blink reflex. And he had also cast an even more awful and involved spell on himself, which completely removed the need for sleep.

LEE: Thus achieving the ultimate paranoid dream.

JUSTIN: Yes. He cast those spells on himself in 1948, so apparently, for fifty years, from then until 1998, he never once closed his eyes. After a while, the muscles must have been frozen too solidly in place for him to close them even if he wanted to. He died with eyes open, and when Ministry personnel took the body and tried to close them, they couldn't.

LEE: How did Snape draw all this out of him?

JUSTIN: As the potions master, Snape was the closest thing Voldemort had to a personal healer, and he sought Snape's advice on what he would have to do to keep the new body in trim.

LEE: Funny thing, Justin; when you were talking about Voldemort's magical power, well, nobody could possibly gainsay that, but when you started paying tribute to his strength of will --

JUSTIN: Right.

LEE: -- I found that harder to accept.

JUSTIN: Yes. When it comes to the great monsters of history, we don't want to concede any virtues beyond strength and skill.

LEE: But I suppose they wouldn't have been great monsters if they had nothing else, they would just have been run-of-the-mill monsters.

JUSTIN: Yes.

LEE: We do know somebody, though, who could match or surpass the late Dark Lord, maybe not in magical ability, but in -- power of determination, strength of mind, will power, whatever language you want to use.

JUSTIN: I assume you're talking about Harry.

LEE: I am. In fact we'd have to say "surpass," wouldn't we, based on what happened in Little Hangleton.

JUSTIN: I remember, when I first read Harry's account in the _Quibbler_ of the confrontation in the graveyard, that was the part I was most skeptical about; how he threw off Voldemort's _Imperius_, how when it was wand to wand, mind to mind, he pushed Voldemort's spell back into his wand. But again, Professor Snape's diary makes it clear he wasn't making this up. Apparently Voldemort was very badly spooked by that, to the point where it was literally death to talk about it. He knew the significance of the fact that Harry had won the battle of _Prior Incantatem_, that it was a contest of strength of mind, or spirit. It drove Tom frantic to think he could lost that kind of fight.

LEE: Dictators are usually obsessed with their own willpower.

JUSTIN: Yes.

LEE: You know, the people who keep writing letters to the editor claiming "Harry Potter is the New Dark Lord!" are going to have a field day with this.

JUSTIN: You know him better than me, maybe you could ask if he has room for another servant.

LEE: We actually prefer "henchman." Though seriously, I'm not sure about that – I mean, whether I really know him better.

JUSTIN: Well, your best friend is his brother in law.

LEE: That gets you good seats at award ceremonies, but it isn't necessarily – well, we're digressing. Oh, what the hell, let's digress. I'm saving my best Harry Potter anecdotes for my own memoirs, so what about you, any good stories? [laughter].

JUSTIN: No, not much, sorry. I know that when we see him at reunions, it's usually Ginny or Hermione who pulls him by the elbow and makes him circulate – Hold on, actually I do have one half-decent story from one of those reunions: Ernie had gotten hold of Harry and was trying to get him to see the light about how important it was to win friends and influence people. So he brought up what happened during our second year, with the "Heir of Slytherin" rumors, and he said a lot of that could have been avoided if Harry had been more gregarious from the start. Ernie said, "what if, when you first came to Hogwarts, you had made a point of going around to all the house tables and introducing yourself, especially to the other first-years?" And Harry said he didn't have any idea that sort of thing was expected, he certainly didn't see any other first year making that kind of production. Ernie replied, "But you weren't just any first year, you were Harry Potter." So Harry stared at him and said "Are you telling me, Ernie, that I was the only student who should have introduced himself to everybody, because I was the only student everybody already knew?" Naturally, Ernie was a bit flummoxed, and muttered back "Well, if you put it that way, it sounds a bit silly, but --" And Harry didn't let him finish the "but," just nodded and said "then you can imagine how I would have felt trying it, at eleven." And that was the end of that conversation.

LEE: It does sound silly if you put it that way, but Ernie did have a point, didn't he? Not that he should have passed out calling cards, but --

JUSTIN: But made some effort to show he didn't think he was above everybody else. So many of us at the time mistook his insecurity and reserve for arrogance. Now, as long as I'm analyzing Harry Potter, and especially the prospect of Dark!Harry, I may as well offer my pet theory about him.

LEE: Please!

JUSTIN: I think when you consider that the only career he ever really considered was Auror, it makes some sense to think about what personality type tends to go into that kind of work. And in the non-magical world, there's a kind of cliché about police, about the way a policeman sees the world. Basically, they divide people into three categories. In descending order of significance, you get first, the comrades, especially the fellow cop on the beat. A policeman will do anything, go to any length for them, will drop any other business if a fellow cop is in trouble. Then second, there are the bad guys, and a policeman is ready to do most anything to them, to make certain they get what's coming to them. It's a never-ending struggle to see to it that police treat criminals – criminal suspects, really – as human beings with rights to be respected.

LEE: And third?

JUSTIN: And third place consists of everybody else on the planet. The civilians. You're ready to die to protect them, but that doesn't mean you really think much of them one way or another. They're simply the great background noise to the conflict between categories one and two. I think Harry is very much a cop in that way. He's a bit more inclusive about category one than a typical cop, I think -- he probably includes everybody who fought Voldemort as a kind of comrade – but otherwise I think the pattern fits. And the reassuring thing is, people with that kind of mind-set simply are simply not interested in power games, conspiracies, all the things that your aspiring Dark Lord is so involved with. They are too straightforward for all that.

LEE: But there are such things as "police states."

JUSTIN: Well, yes, but I don't think you'd find any that actually originated at the station-house, with the captain and the lieutenant saying "You know what, I think we need more authority and less civilian interference, let's stage a coup."

I might also mention, a rather astonishing proportion of policemen turn out to have been mistreated or abused as children. I suppose for half of them, being a policeman means having the stick in your hand instead of your father's, and for the other half it means trying to make sure that nobody, or as few people as possible, have to go through the sort of thing you went through.

LEE: We'll be back in a minute to talk more with Justin Finch-Fletchley. We'll be taking your questions later on in the program, so please write in if you have anything to ask Justin.


	2. Chapter 2

LEE: We're back with Justin Finch-Fletchley. So Justin, you've just voluntarily risked your life to take part in the battle against Voldemort and the Death Eaters, victory has been won, and the first acknowledgement you get of your labors is....?

JUSTIN: Is a cheery little note from Dolores Umbridge, saying I had been caught using my stolen magic against true wizards and I was to turn myself in to the Ministry no later than tomorrow to have my punishment assessed, she hoped for my sake I would not put up any kind of fuss or cause any unpleasantness, sincerely, etcetera.

LEE: And you were not the only Newblood receiving that invitation.

JUSTIN: All of us did, except -- all of us who were at Hogwarts did, Dean, Dennis, Natalie, Sally-Anne, ten in all; there was only one of us who didn't get the summons, and that was Hermione.

LEE: The most prominent Newblood of all.

JUSTIN: The one who had cast more spells against purebloods than the rest of us put together. We could see what Umbridge was trying for, she knew she couldn't have Hermione, that Harry and Ron and dozens of other wizards and witches wouldn't stand for it, they would fight to the death before allowing it. But the rest of us, who knows, maybe we wouldn't be missed, maybe the rest of wizarding society would say it wasn't worth bothering about.

LEE: Perhaps she'd had too much long-term exposure to kitty litter.

JUSTIN: Well, we couldn't just chuckle and ignore this as the ranting of a lunatic, she was still –

LEE: No, I didn't mean to imply that --

JUSTIN: -- still in office, she had done a lot of damage to a lot of people, she was representing a point of view that wasn't dead, just because Voldemort was. And especially to people like Dean, who'd been on the run for a year like a hunted animal, or Dennis, who'd seen his brother killed, to get a letter like that the day after it was "over," you can see --

LEE: Absolutely. Not to be put up with.

JUSTIN: Not for a single second. We all got in touch with each other, very quickly, and were debating what to do about it, and the most popular proposal was Dean's, who said we should all go down to the Ministry, like the note said, except we'd go together and when we got there we would head straight for Umbridge's office and haul her out by force, and -- we hadn't decided on what exactly, maybe throw her to the Centaurs – and we were going to announce to everybody there what we were doing and why, and say, "Now, we're going to break this witch's wand and send her packing, does anybody want to try to stop us?" I mean, let's see where we stand in this world, how many people still need... persuading.

LEE: How much persuading were you ready to do?

JUSTIN: If we had actually gone through with it? We would have played tit for tat, I'd say. Or maybe two tits for a tat. But while we were still in the planning stage, Hermione had – she wasn't at the meeting, but she knew about it from Dean and Dennis, the fellow Gryffindors – anyway, Hermione had contacted Kingsley, and Kingsley had come to ask us to give him a chance to handle it. And it took some arguing, I must say. By that point pretty much all of us had the _Sinn Fein_ spirit, "ourselves, alone." Of course we Finch-Fletchleys have always been particularly known for our blood-red revolutionism.

LEE: I suspect you're having me on.

JUSTIN: Oh yes. I mean, quite the reverse has been true, historically, we're a very Tory family. We're very strongly against the actual _Sinn Fein_, my father fought against the IRA for years. You know, I sometimes imagine that if Hermione and I hadn't been magical, we would have ended up running against one another for a seat in Parliament. I assume she would be running as the Labor candidate.

LEE: And in these flights of fancy, who's the winner?

JUSTIN: It's rather hard to win an argument against Hermione, even in the safety of one's own imagination [laughter]. Still, I think I actually did, once. It was on D-V Day, when we were preparing for the Death Eaters' final assault, and Hermione started giving everybody a final word of, of inspiration, which – well, who was more entitled? She wanted to get across the idea that if we found ourselves fighting Voldemort, we couldn't just freeze in despair, on the assumption he was too powerful for one of our spells to bring him down, after all there were dozens of us, and if we all hit him at the same time it might do the job. Very good; an absolutely necessary point to make. And she illustrated, saying that was how the Inca fell to the Spaniards, the Inca had the numbers but they gave up when they saw the first arrows bouncing off the Spanish armor, but actually if they had all kept on fighting, they could have overwhelmed the armor by force of numbers. All right, fine example, if you're familiar with fifteenth century non-magical history and technology. But she wouldn't leave it at that, she had to start then about what a tragedy it was, the loss of native culture to the forces of imperialism, colonialism, missionary presumption, until I finally said something like, "I think in this case the natives were actually ruled by a hereditary 'pure blood' aristocracy, weren't they Hermione?" She started to say something back but Ron intervened and said this wasn't the time or place for this kind of debate --

LEE: I'm sure he used those exact words.

JUSTIN: Give or take one or two effings and bleedings, perhaps. [laughter]

LEE: Getting back to the confrontation with Umbridge, or the effort to avoid a confrontation....

JUSTIN: Yes. Kingsley gave his word that Umbridge and everybody who did the Death Eaters' work for them would face consequences, at a minimum removal from the ministry, that in fact he was having a select group put together to question and investigate, with the goal of reconstituting the Ministry and the Wizenmagot, which had been – they had been decimated, especially the Wizenmagot, following the coup.

LEE: And this of course was what became the Portius Commission. It ended up having such a vast reach, held so many hearings and investigated so many prominent witches and wizards, but you're saying it started basically as an employment review board.

JUSTIN: But that was a crucial first task, because -- let's face it, it was all, the legitimacy of the Shacklebolt administration, was all one huge bootstrapping operation, if you want to be cynical about it. He was appointed Minister basically by his own close comrades, a group which numbered in the low two figures, and then he cleared out the people who had been on the Wizenmagot, which was of course stuffed with Death Eaters, and the new Wizenmagot, the people who then had the power to confirm him or remove him from power, were the ones he appointed, who owed him these positions. It's hard to expect overwhelming public trust on that basis, so he wanted to have at least one more layer – an independent body which could say who was in or who was out in the new government – the restored government, as Minister Shacklebolt preferred to put it.

LEE: But in order to settle that, you had to separate those who would be loyal to the new government from those who still had loyalties to the previous regime.

JUSTIN: Not just that; Madame Portius said quite definitively, when Shacklebolt asked her to head the commission, that she wasn't going to make decisions on the basis of whether somebody was loyal or disloyal to Kingsley Shacklebolt, but on their general character and fitness. And that of course opened the door to some very long and rather excruciating sessions, interrogations.

LEE: But that was the part people really wanted to hear. We all tuned in to WWN, we all listened to these hearings – it wasn't because we couldn't live without knowing who was going to be Wizenmagot member for Dorchester, or whether the folks in the Department of Sports kept their jobs, we wanted to know what Yaxley and Umbridge and the rest had done, and whether they had any remorse for it. It wasn't ever really just an employment board; Yaxley wasn't looking to keep his position, after all, so that justification really didn't fly.

JUSTIN: No, the commission did evolve into a kind of general board of inquiry -- Truth Commission, War Crimes Tribunal, what you will. But even Yaxley – officially at least, he was first called to testify because Umbridge had said her orders came from him, so we were charged with finding whether that was true.

LEE: But whether it was true or not, you didn't have judicial authority. So what was the basis for calling on Yaxley to testify? Even if he said "No, I didn't give that order," and you believed him, you weren't going to add anything to Umbridge's indictment or punishment, it wasn't your job to do that.

JUSTIN: No, that wasn't part of our mandate. But the testimony we received did form the basis for indictments later --

LEE: And those indictments were issued by the Wizenmagot, and membership in the Wizenmagot was subject to the Portius Commission...

JUSTIN: Yes, it's hardly the kind of system I would recommend for normal times, but these weren't normal times. I suppose there are going to be some Death Eater apologists who still cry foul and say it was all rigged, it was all politics, and point to just this kind of... circularity, as evidence for that.

LEE: What do you say to them?

JUSTIN: I say, show us an example of what you think is actual injustice, not just a procedural problem. Show us an example of where you think we didn't go after the truth. I don't think they can. We did want to know the truth, and we thought we were acting on behalf of the public, which wanted – needed to know it also. I think we did a reasonably good job of that.

LEE: I think so too. We'll be back in a minute to talk some more with Justin Finch-Fletchley.

* * *

LEE: Justin, there was something you said you wanted to add to your last point about the commission's goals.

JUSTIN: Yes, first, I didn't want to leave the wrong impression by saying "just procedural," I know that procedure and precedent matters a great deal. That was one of our goals also, to try to set some standards and precedents for the future.

LEE: By the way, you haven't said yet: how did you come to be on the commission?

JUSTIN: It was thought that there had to be somebody representing the Newblood perspective – Muggle-born, we still said then. I later learned that the first suggestion for that slot was Arthur Weasley, because he was known to be a strong defender of Muggles and Muggleborns, but Kingsley vetoed that idea. I think all of us would have been furious at that appointment.

LEE: Not, I take it, because you had anything against Arthur --

JUSTIN: No, certainly not; but that would have been a declaration that we were still considered, either as aliens who weren't entitled to a place on such a body, or as children whose interests had to be represented by someone else. Fortunately, Kingsley didn't think that way. And they also wanted somebody from the younger – from the Harry Potter generation, you'd have to say, since that generation bore so much of the battle. Hermione would have seemed the obvious choice, but some of the other members, or member-candidates, were still leery of her as a radical, thinking she would be bringing house elves to testify against their masters--

LEE: As indeed she would have.

JUSTIN: Perhaps so.

LEE: No, I can state that as a fact. There were many times when George had me over to the Burrow and we all found ourselves listening very intently to the hearings. That was one of the most consistent themes of Hermione's commentary, "Why don't they just ask the house elves? It's sheer prejudice." But she did think that on the whole you did a very good job.

JUSTIN: That's very good to know; honestly. But aside from the house elf issue, there was also the fact that Hermione had taken part in a number of acts that seemed – they thought, having one of the Invaders of Gringotts on this very official body might seem a bit dicey, raise too many problems or eyebrows.

LEE: Somewhat ironic, that, considering they ended up with the man who almost became the Guy Fawkes of the wizarding world. Did that fact came up during the appointment process?

JUSTIN: No, that was something we were decidedly against revealing at the time.

LEE: Don't worry, listeners, we'll explain what we're talking about a little later in the programme.

JUSTIN: Basically though, I had Kingsley's confidence, and was acceptable to Madame Portius, so, the lot fell to me.

LEE: Did you know anything about her, by the way, when you were asked to be on the commission?

JUSTIN: I didn't know anything about her before the coup, but we did – the resistance movement – did keep up with what was happening on the Wizenmagot, and obviously it was her performance there which recommended her.

LEE: As an incorruptible.

JUSTIN: Right, basically, when the Death-Eater government came to power, there were two options for the Wizenmagot members, or it seemed that way anyway – you could flee, whether you joined the resistance or just went into hiding, or you could stay and be a good puppet and rubber stamp. And Madame Portius was the one exception. She stayed on the board, but she stuck to her guns, to the law. Yaxley would come with a motion to have someone put in Azkaban without trial, which required unanimous consent from the Wizenmagot--

LEE: If they were going to do it legally.

JUSTIN: But for a time anyway, they did want to do things legally, under color of law.

LEE: To keep the public pacified.

JUSTIN: Sure, to keep up the pretense that this was all just a continuation of government, there was no coup, there was no dictatorship, just a change in policy and emphasis.

LEE: So when Yaxley made the unanimous consent motion, Portius was always the lone dissenter.

JUSTIN: And they had to stage a full trial. And Portius was typically the only one raising procedural questions, evidentiary questions, generally preventing the trial from being rushed through in three minutes.

LEE: But still, in the end, the verdict would come down, and it would be fifty nine votes guilty, one vote innocent. So she didn't really change anything, did she?

JUSTIN: I wouldn't say – At least she slowed down their plans, put a wrench in their machinery to some extent.

LEE: If she had been seen as a serious obstacle though, she would have been removed, imprisoned, herself.

JUSTIN: Undoubtedly. But she was not to be intimidated.

LEE: No, a woman who would cast a silencing spell on Harry Potter with half the world listening, live, obviously wasn't lacking in courage. Still, to play devil's advocate a bit here, she had some leeway in the Death Eater days, not immunity of course, but her pureblood status --

JUSTIN: Sure.

LEE: -- and reputation as a conservative, a pillar of the community --

JUSTIN: -- that made the Death Eaters hesitant to put their feet down on her, yes.

LEE: And it could be argued, she used this, her relative safety, to strike a kind of moral pose --

JUSTIN: No, no --

LEE: Well, devil's advocate, still; wasn't she giving legitimacy to the Death Eater government? Helping them get away with the pose we just talked about, that they really were just enforcing the laws, and after all you couldn't call them tyrants, because, 'see here, here was this woman in opposition, and you don't see anything happening to her, do you?'

JUSTIN: No, I don't see it that way at all. I see her as trying her best to give an example, trying to keep the idea of law and justice alive in a very dark time.

LEE: Alright, let's leave it at that. Juno Portius of course died last year at the age of ninety-nine, and among those paying tribute at her memorial service was Harry James Potter, who seemed to have gotten over any resentment at that old _Silencio!_

And what we're going to do now, with Justin's assistance, is review that incident, and some of the other more interesting moments from the Portius hearings. And I thought we would start with the testimony of Amycus Carrow.

JUSTIN: All right. I imagine most of our listeners know what's coming, it's one of the most often-recalled episodes of the hearings --

LEE: I know that Harry and Ginny rather wish it could be forgotten.

JUSTIN: [Laughing] I'm sure.

LEE: Mr. and Mrs. Potter, fair warning, turn off your radios now, or at least cover your children's ears. But what was the background, why was Carrow being asked to testify?

JUSTIN: Carrow was one of the teachers-cum-enforcers at Hogwarts during the Death Eater reign, and we had statements from all sorts of students about the kinds of things that went on – the casual use of _Cruciatus_, all that – with his encouragement, under his orders. That wasn't in question. We were looking to see what his rationale was, the Death Eater point of view. What were they aiming at, their ultimate goals and so forth.

LEE: And Carrow was very forthcoming.

JUSTIN: It took no pressure at all to get him to talk. He was quite unapologetic.

LEE: There's a little-known charm which allows us to hear the voices of the speakers, as long as we have both a true transcript and a wizard or witch who was present at the time. Justin, obviously, you were there, so would you do the honors?

JUSTIN: Certainly. _In Propria Persona._

_* * * * *_

_VOICE OF AMYCUS CARROW: We wanted to give them a proper sense of pride, that was what it was about. The Purebloods, they had all been stuffed full of rubbish by Dumbledore for those years, it took some doing to get them to try to see things plain, about the differences. They had to know about the differences, who they were and who the others were. _

_VOICE OF JUNO PORTIUS: What were you told to do, then, about those who couldn't be made to understand?_

_CARROW: It wasn't like that, what you're thinking. These were Purebloods, we didn't want to hurt them, not if we could help it. And they figured that out, saw that they could get away with all kinds of backtalk. The worst was the Longbottom boy and the Weasley girl, so we made a point to go after – to show them, tell them what was what. The Weasley girl, we knew, had been running round with the Muggle boy, Thomas, most of the last year, and we thought we'd stand her up and let her and everybody know what, like how..._

_PORTIUS: You wanted to humiliate her with this relationship, publicly, so she wouldn't have so much influence over the others._

_CARROW: That's right. We brought her up, front and center, and said "is this true, Miss Weasley? You're a pureblood young woman of almost marriage age, and you let this Muggle boy touch you?" Well, the little b--, the girl didn't, not only didn't deny it, she was -- she wasn't -- she didn't have a pinch of shame about it, she admitted it, she started __describing __it to us, what it was like having this boy there to, there for her.... pleasure. God what a mouth that chit had, the way she went on, like "Yes, yes, he was mine and I was his, oh Dean you marvelous Muggle-born boy, how that delightfully impure blood stormed through his Muggle veins and set my skin blazing until even my poor freckles longed to burst with ecstasy, no weak insipid pureblood could ever compete with that, and the kisses that his Muggle mouth rained down on my bruised and battered lips, still crying for more, more, and"... [Pause] Well, and more like that, that sort of thing._

_[Pause]_

_PORTIUS: The witness seems to remember this speech in most acute detail...._

* * * * *

JUSTIN: The whole committee just completely lost control at that point. Portius had to call a ten-minute recess to let us all pull ourselves together.

LEE: And thus was born the legend of Dean Thomas, International Sex Symbol.

JUSTIN: _Witch Weekly_ should give him a percentage. He must have sold more copies for them...

LEE: I think he gets his commission, so to speak, in other ways. "The Dean's List" probably has about ten feet of parchment worth of entries by now.

JUSTIN: However awful it was all that year at Hogwarts, I sometimes think being there to hear Ginny Weasley deliver that speech would almost have made up for it all.

LEE: Of course there were so many witnesses, the speech could be reconstructed word for word.

JUSTIN: And set to music.

LEE: Oh yes, that song. Ginny has a standing threat of a year's supply of bat bogeys to anybody who so much as hums two notes of that tune in her presence. And – I'm going to burn one of my Weasley-Potter anecdotes here – George discovered the hard way that she wasn't kidding. At the rehearsal for Ginny and Harry's wedding, as Ginny came down the aisle expecting to hear Mendelsohn's Wedding March, we all got a blast instead of "Who's the Muggleborn Man with the real slow hand? Dean!"

JUSTIN: That was quite... Gryffindor of George, wasn't it?

LEE: In the sense of displaying a truly spectacular guts-to-brains ratio?

JUSTIN: Yes. I'm surprised he still has a nose.

LEE: He negotiated payment terms with Ginny, instead of taking the whole brunt at once he gets one hex a month for thirty years. Family discount, she says.

JUSTIN: But you know, Ginny is very highly respected among all the Newbloods I know, exactly because she made that kind of... statement. That -- leaving aside that we all know she was being decidedly over-the-top, in a desire to take a stand against the Death Eaters, clearly she never had the slightest embarrassment about having dated Dean.

LEE: Back to the Portius Commission. The basis for a lot of the interrogating, you've said, was the Snape Diary.

JUSTIN: It was the basic guide for us on who were the real supporters of Voldemort, especially in the Ministry, and who was just trying to get along.

LEE: You've read it more carefully than most of us; what do you make of Severus Snape?

JUSTIN: I think he took Dumbledore's charge very seriously, to protect the students as well as he could. He's still a man you find very difficult either to like or admire, because you get a very strong sense that he was holding his nose all the while at this unpleasant duty to preserve our worthless lives.

LEE: A lot of us still haven't gotten over the shock of Harry and Ginny naming their last child "Albus Severus."

JUSTIN: I suppose, Snape used to be the man who hated Harry's father, so he couldn't be forgiven anything; then he was the man who loved Harry's mother, so he could be forgiven everything. But I think of it this way: he was a double agent, a spy for Dumbledore against Voldemort pretending to be a spy for Voldemort against Dumbledore. So he had a choice in how he could present himself. He could have said to Voldemort, "In order to do my job, I have to convince Dumbledore I'm on his side, so I'm going to go easy on Potter and his friends, unpleasant as that is", or he could do the opposite, tell Dumbledore he had to constantly persecute all the 'Mudbloods' and their supporters in order to keep up the front for Voldemort. He chose to play it the latter way. Why that choice? It seems obvious he found it easier, more natural, to act that way, found it more pleasant and rewarding to be a malicious bigot.

LEE: And no discussion of malicious bigots could be complete without a bow to that grand old family, those most pallid of purebloods, the Malfoys... some of the most dramatic moments in the Portius hearings involved our old friends.

JUSTIN: They brought the drama, it wasn't as if we on the commission were looking for it. The Malfoys could have come out of the process with a new start; at least I should think Draco and Narcissa might have, if they had tried hard enough, offered something resembling an apology. But no, they had to keep standing up for their right to despise their inferiors.

LEE: Including your presumptuous self, for having the cheek to sit there and take part in a body demanding answers from her...

JUSTIN: Mudblood that I was.

LEE: So here's another of the most memorable moments from the hearings, one starring our guest. Justin?

JUSTIN: _In propria persona._

_* * * * *_

_VOICE OF MADAME PORTIUS: Did you consider yourself a supporter of Voldemort?_

_VOICE OF NARCISSA MALFOY: I never received the mark._

_PORTIUS: That is not a full answer._

_NARCISSA: By the end of the war, I did not think of myself in those terms._

_PORTIUS: Very well, we naturally take from this the implication that you earlier had thought of yourself as a supporter. What did you hope for from his victory?_

_NARCISSA: I wanted to be able to live in a society of genuine witches and wizards, who understood that there was more to being magical than the ability to cast a levitation charm. There was a whole class of people who had been brought up being told all you need to be a wizard is to make sparks come out of a wand. _

_PORTIUS: In addition to magical ability then, you define a "genuine" witch or wizard how?_

_NARCISSA: Heritage. Birth. Blood. Yes, I know it isn't fashionable or correct to refer to these things in today's political climate, but there are some things that run in the blood. _

_MADAME PORTIUS: Not everybody on this committee would disagree with that. Isn't that right, Mr. Finch-Fletchley?_

_VOICE OF JUSTIN FINCH-FLETCHLEY: That's true, Madame, my family certainly believes very strongly in taking pride in its heritage. I've often heard my father speaking of how some qualities "run in the blood."_

_NARCISSA; Oh, that's very amusing. Very amusing. I don't know who this boy's father is, but I'm certain that if we went back far enough in his lineage we would find a digger or some other mud-wallower._

_JUSTIN: Well... It's quite possible, Mrs. Malfoy, that if we traced my ancestry back several dozen generations we might find a ditch-digger. On the other hand, it's quite certain that if we trace your lineage forward just one generation, we will find a son of a bitch._

_* * * * *_

JUSTIN: That exchange cost us both a few galleons in contempt penalties.

LEE: Was the look on Narcissa's Malfoy's face worth it?

JUSTIN: Easily. At ten times the price.

LEE: Now there's been some degree of sympathy for Draco, since the war ended, as – supposedly – a victim of targeting by Newblood-rights extremists.

JUSTIN: I'm glad for that "supposedly." I imagine you're speaking primarily of Dennis Creevey and some of his friends.

LEE: Sure. Are they not engaged in a campaign of harassment or intimidation against Draco and others?

JUSTIN: No. Categorically not. I'm not a member of Dennis' group, but in this case, all he is doing is making a point of getting himself a place at the table, literally or figuratively, of the old Pureblood haunts. Not private clubs: public areas, restaurants, parks, theatres, but all of which were always considered, quote, "theirs." He and other Newbloods show up and order a meal or play a little Quidditch or see the show --

LEE: Quite conspicuously.

JUSTIN: It's conspicuous because of the reaction, not because of their presence in and of itself.

LEE: But that's what they're hoping for, isn't it? To cause a stir?

JUSTIN: I can't say what they're hoping for, because – again – I'm not a member, but it seems to me that they have a perfect right to be in a public place, and it's a bit perverse to turn the focus of suspicion or outrage on the Newblood for being in a place they're entitled to be, rather than on those who are trying to keep up the barriers against them. I think the point is that these barriers don't belong there, and Dennis is making a demonstration of the fact that they aren't going to play along with them.

LEE: And Draco Malfoy finds this discomforting.

JUSTIN: Draco spends, or used to spend, a lot of his free time in these traditional Purebloods-only locales, and he kept running into Dennis there, so he started raising hew and cry about being followed and persecuted and so on. We all know perfectly well what actually happens: Draco sees Dennis and starts snickering and sniffing and sneering – unloading the entire arsenal of his dreaded wit – and Dennis and company, instead of cowering in shame, will come right back at him. That's the harassment, that's the intolerable affront.

LEE: Draco only spent a short time before the commission, right?

JUSTIN: Yes, he was considered a minor acting under duress. The fact that both Dumbledore and Snape had gone to such lengths to try to protect him, that Harry had considered his life worth saving, all made the commission very reluctant to press him.

LEE: No such factors were working in favor of Lucius Malfoy, though.

JUSTIN: No, he was always going to have a hard time persuading anybody to give him a second – third chance, actually.

LEE: "Bribe and lie your way out of Azkaban once, shame on you; do it twice, shame on me."

JUSTIN: And that was the feeling even before Harry made his... threat, warning, proclamation, whatever you want to call it.

LEE: Let's go to the transcript again, shall we?

JUSTIN: _In propria persona_.

_* * * * *_

_VOICE OF MADAME PORTIUS: Mr. Potter, you have asked to give a statement about Mrs. Narcissa Malfoy's testimony concerning yourself. _

_VOICE OF HARRY POTTER: Yes, Ma'am. _

_PORTIUS: You may proceed. _

_POTTER: Thank you, Madame Commissioner._

_Mrs. Malfoy has testified that when Voldemort asked her, just before the Battle of Hogwarts, to confirm that I was dead, she lied to him and said that I was; that this certainly saved my life, and made it possible in the end for Riddle to be killed; and that she was taking a horrible risk by deceiving him in this way. All this is true. But Mrs. Malfoy wants you all to agree that this puts me and the rest of the wizarding world in her family's debt, and that this one good deed should cover all the crimes of anybody named Malfoy. Now I've had some strange experiences with wizarding justice, but – [LAUGHTER]._

_PORTIUS: Order, order. _

_POTTER: ...but I find it hard to believe any justice system could act this way. Still, if we really need some kind of accounting of the balance sheet between Mrs. Malfoy and me, I think the fact that I saved Draco's life – twice -- more than covers my debt to her, and she's welcome to keep the change for herself and for Draco. But not for Lucius Malfoy. _

_Lucius Malfoy – and I'm only talking now about what I know of him from personal experience – was full of gratitude to see his "Lord" come back, laughed when Riddle tortured me and promised to kill me, was fully prepared to torture or kill other schoolchildren in his master's service. In particular, he was willing to see schoolchildren [PAUSE] violated, and killed, in his master's service, even at a time when Riddle was only a disembodied spirit who was powerless to force him into anything. _

_So there are a few things I want to say about the prospect of pardoning or rehabilitating Lucius Malfoy. First, he is about the farthest man from deserving it I can imagine. His former house elf was a hundred times finer, braver, and better a man than he'll ever be. Second, that from what I do understand of old wizarding law, I have a right to pursue justice against Lucius Malfoy, and that right is only going to double over time -- _

_PORTIUS: Mr. Potter, that could be construed as a threat-- _

_POTTER: -- and as long as Lucius Malfoy is still freely walking around Britain, I won't consider the war to be over. _

_PORTIUS: SILENCIO! _

* * * * *

LEE: Now I was at WWR at the time, doing my apprenticing, and of course we were all listening intently, when suddenly at this dramatic moment the broadcast goes ominously dead. It turned into a madhouse there very quickly, people firecalling back and forth unsuccessfully to find out what going on, asking "can you believe that Portius just silenced Harry Potter?" What was happening on your end?

JUSTIN: Mme. Portius just ended the transmission immediately; she had only allowed broadcasting in the first place on the condition that she had the power to cut it off at a word. So she took us off the record, banished all the reporters and set up silencing charms over the room. Then she exploded at Harry. She said he had not only completely poisoned any possible investigation into the Malfoy crimes he had just outlined, he'd severely undermined the commission's credibility; he'd acted in clear disregard of her warning about making threats, and she would start right now looking into possible contempt charges.

LEE: How did Harry take that?

JUSTIN: He didn't react much at all; if anything he seemed to be bowing his head just a touch in acknowledgement. It looked like he was prepared for something like this. And that seemed to make Mme. Portius more furious. She said that if she had a record of who was listening to the broadcast, she would go to each of their homes and Obliviate them one by one. Which almost gave me a fit of the giggles, because it made me think of all the times I'd seen a television or movie courtroom drama and heard the judge say, "The jury will disregard the witness's last remark" --

LEE: But if it's a non-magical judge, how can he expect them just to forget --

JUSTIN: Right, that was always the point, that they couldn't forget it just because the judge had "instructed" them too, and so when I heard Mme. Portius say that I thought, wait now, I'd never thought of that, in the magical world when the judge says 'you will disregard that remark,' she can actually make them disregard that remark. And if Harry's remarks hadn't been heard by a million or so wizards and witches...

LEE: At the time I thought there were plenty of Death Eaters who had done as much or more as Malfoy had, so I didn't know what to make of it. I knew Harry wanted to become an Auror, and I thought, he's just ended his chance at that.

JUSTIN: That was another of the points Mme. Portius threw at him.

LEE: What were you thinking at that point? About whether what Harry had said was really as dangerous as Mme. Portius was making it out to be?

JUSTIN: I was quite disturbed. It surprised me, and it worried me. It seemed to me at the time that Harry was throwing down the gauntlet, telling the world, here, this is what I plan to do about this enemy of mine, what are you going to do about it? With the implication, You wouldn't dare do anything to me, whatever the law says, so I'm going to just walk out of here and... pursue whatever revenge I see proper. It was all a bit chilling, I don't mind saying. I thought we were entitled to a little more time, a little more trust, in putting the justice system back together before Harry came in throwing his weight around, and I didn't like to think of what would happen if push came to shove.

LEE: A lot of us were thinking along those lines, and I remember catching up with George the next day and asking for his take on the news, and wondering why he was so chipper in his response, which went something like "I hear Harry got a lecture from the teacher and got sent off without pudding, but I think he's been through worse, don't you?" Then he said something like "He's a good kid, you know. He's a keeper." So George obviously knew why Harry was so obsessed with Lucius not getting off, and approved. But when I asked him, George just shook his head and said 'Really, Lee, you don't want to know. Leave it, mate' So, at the time, they still thought they could keep what happened to Ginny out of it.

Of course that didn't last, because the day after that we heard the press conference with the statement from Aloysius Featherstone, the Malfoy solicitor, which we'll hear when we return after a short break. I'm Lee Jordan, and you're listening to "Many Rivers."...


	3. Chapter 3

_VOICE OF ALOYSIUS FEATHERSTONE: I have a statement to be read, at the request of my client, Mr. Lucius Malfoy, in response to the notorious statements of Harry Potter from yesterday. _

_Mr. Malfoy has decided that for the good of Wizarding England, he must regretfully leave the home and country he loves so well, and seek refuge elsewhere. In the face of yesterday's threats from Mr. Harry Potter, it is obvious he would not at present be able to return to the normal and peaceful life which was all he longed for, and which should be the entitlement of every English witch and wizard after our long and terrible conflict. While Mr. Malfoy considers himself fully capable of defending himself in any legitimate duel with Mr. Potter, he fears that as long as he remained in England, not only he but the other members of his family would be in continual danger from would-be assassins, who would be encouraged by Mr. Potter's statement to take vengeance on any Malfoy in order to gain the thanks and favor of the hero of the moment. Since delay would serve no purpose but to tempt such violence, Mr. Malfoy has already left the country, though he does not renounce his citizenship._

_Mr. Malfoy feels very strongly that the situation should not be allowed to rest without some explanation for Mr. Potter's malignant attitude towards him. He therefore has offered a sworn affidavit testifying to the following of his own personal knowledge:_

_First, "that in 1993, Hogwarts was under attack, as is well known, from a basilisk, which was able to escape the detection of Headmaster Dumbledore and all his trusted faculty, petrify four students – who escaped death by the merest of chances – and so threaten Hogwarts that the Board of Governors, led by myself, were on the verge of closing the school."_

_Second "that this basilisk was actually being controlled and set upon the students by Miss Ginevra Weasley, then a second-year student who had, either deliberately or through criminal carelessness, begun toying with a Dark Magic artefact, and allowed it to guide her actions. This fact – not known at all by the general wizarding public – was confessed to me by Professor Dumbledore, in the presence of Harry Potter, when I hasted to Hogwarts on behalf of the Board in order to learn the outcome of the latest attack. I was reluctantly persuaded not to publicize this in deference to Miss Weasley's status as a minor."_

_Third, and most crucially, "that Harry Potter immediately accused me of supplying this Dark Magic artefact to Miss Weasley; that when I demanded he provide proof for this slanderous accusation, he had none; that Potter has ever since then blamed me for these events, as he insinuated in his testimony the other day when he spoke of my 'violating' children; and that as he grew closer to Miss Weasley he became more and more obsessed with gaining revenge on me for my supposed beguiling of her...."_

_* * * * *_

LEE: Justin, I'm sure some of our listeners don't know that you were one of the four students who narrowly escaped death from the basilisk's gaze.

JUSTIN: Me, Colin, Hermione, and Penelope Clearwater.

LEE: After the basilisk was killed and you were all revived, were you told what had happened, how the basilisk had gotten loose?

JUSTIN: No of course not, Lee; this was Hogwarts, remember? The castle that inspired Bluebeard.

LEE: Ah yes, silly of me. How I used to look forward to those start-of-term messages: "Have a good year, students, and remember, under no circumstances must you open _that_ door, or go up _that_ staircase, or into _that_ enclosure..."

JUSTIN: And then the end-of-term questions we would be left with: "What happened to Professor Quirrel, what was he trying to do when he died? What was Sirius Black here for and why are we being told not to worry about him anymore?" It wasn't just the Chamber of Secrets, it was the Castle of Secrets. Still is, to some extent.

LEE: And you still feel some bitterness about the cover up of that year's events.

JUSTIN: Some. I understand the desire to protect Ginny, and I don't blame her for the attack on me...

LEE: "But..."?

JUSTIN: But it was frustrating not to be given answers. I was just assured that everything was all right, it had been taken care of, it was a basilisk and Harry had killed it. Presumably we were supposed to nod and say "Oh, jolly good show, Harry," but an announcement like that almost seems calculated to leave one dumfounded and disbelieving. How does a twelve-year-old kill a class five creature?

LEE: Unless he had some dark-magic way of controlling and subduing it in the first place....

JUSTIN: Quite. And as for all our other questions... "The Heir of Slytherin, the one who's been writing messages in blood on the walls, the one who's been taking credit for all the attacks, you caught him then? Who was he?" "Oh, don't worry, he won't be troubling us again." And that was the end of it. It bothers me to think, for example, that Colin died without ever knowing.

LEE: Perhaps he did know. Ginny was his housemate and yearmate, she might have told him.

JUSTIN: No, Dennis was pretty categorical that Colin went on expressing a degree of frustration at this from time to time, up to the end.

LEE: And now you learn something like the true story, assuming you could trust Lucius Malfoy.

JUSTIN: Actually, I did trust that the basic story was true, only that he was lying about that last bit, about not having had anything to go with providing the Riddle Diary –

LEE: Though Malfoy never referred to it as the Riddle Diary.

JUSTIN: No, and Harry hadn't specified it as such when he gave the Ministry a list of the destroyed horcruxes. He identified it as "a book belonging to one of Slytherin's descendants."

LEE: Which was literally true, of course.

JUSTIN: But obviously a lie of omission.

LEE: He didn't want to use the word "diary," because so many people had seen Ginny writing so obsessively in _her _diary that year, and he was afraid they might make the connection.

JUSTIN. Yes, I understand that. In any case, that detail was supplied the next day, with Ginny's testimony. But even before that – when we heard that statement from Featherstone, it immediately allowed us, on the Commission, to make sense of a passage from Snape's diary that had been rather mysterious at first reading. He was describing the second gathering of the Death Eaters, the first one Snape was present for, and Voldemort had Malfoy come forward, in front of all of them, to be humiliated and Cruciated. And Snape recorded how Voldemort told them the reason for this, that Lucius had been entrusted with a "precious possession" of his, of Voldie's, and that he had let it be destroyed, had, quote "thrown it away, given it to a little Hogwarts girl to play with." And it wasn't terribly hard now, in light of Featherstone's speech, to see that they were all talking about the same "dark artefact," that the "little Hogwarts girl" must have been Ginny Weasley.

LEE: And obviously, that Lucius had given this artefact to Ginny, just as Harry had accused him.

JUSTIN: Of course. And we also understood then what Harry was talking about with his references to having a right that would double in time, to pursue vengeance against Lucius Malfoy. I'd had to be brought up to speed about old wizarding law, and one of the points, the aspects of old law that was quite clear and still on the books, was a wizard's or witch's right to issue challenges on behalf of a wronged spouse. So in effect, when he made that threat, Harry was announcing their engagement, his and Ginny's. Perhaps not the most conventional way in which to make such an announcement.

LEE: I think Molly was happy to take it any way she could get it. And my conversation with George also made a lot more sense after that. What really struck me, though, re-reading what Harry had said, was that it might have been an offer as well as a threat. "As long as as Lucius Malfoy is still walking free _in England..._" Harry may have been suggesting that Malfoy do exactly what he did: leave the country. As if to say "I can't let you get away with what you did, and we both know why, but in consideration for what you wife did, I'm giving you fair warning and a chance to get away." And hopefully he would take the secret with him.

JUSTIN: Well, there is certainly some plausibility to that. Though, again, I don't know Harry well enough to be able to make much of a guess about whether that's how his mind works.

LEE: It might not have been just his statement, though. I have to believe the whole family had a conference where it was ironed out.

JUSTIN: But they all must have known that Lucius wasn't going to keep that secret out of, as an act of mere charity.

LEE: Which is why Ginny was very well prepared to make her statement the next day.

JUSTIN: Yes, she certainly made a strong and yet sympathetic figure on the stand. Partly because we all were sympathetic from the start --

LEE: Even yourself, having just discovered that she was behind your near-death experience?

JUSTIN: Well, mostly. My first thoughts had been along the lines of "I've chatted with her how many times, been in the D.A. together for the better part of a year, and all this time...." But then Lucius naming her was so obviously an act of perfectly gratuitous malice, that... He really thought he was being cute, taking this parting shot and getting out of the way, and assuming that doubt would always linger over whether he was responsible, or whether his claim of innocence would be accepted. But everyone could see that he could easily, easily have put his statement in a way which didn't bring Ginny Weasley into it at all. You have a fight with Harry Potter, alright then, go after Harry Potter. Say, in your statement "Harry Potter has paranoid delusions that I have committed terrible crimes against him and his loved ones." If he had been innocent, there would have been absolutely no need to implicate Ginny in order to vindicate himself, and even before all the information came to light about the Snape Diary, and about Dobby's warnings to Harry, and everything else which confirmed Harry and Ginny's story, people had to ask themselves: 'What kind of man would so casually drop this kind of poison behind him as he fled?' and the answer had to be, 'Exactly the kind of man who would leave a dark-magic artefact to work its evil on a young girl.' I don't think Lucius Malfoy really understood, or perhaps understands to this day, how completely he had ruined whatever was left of his name by doing that. He was probably still preening himself about his cleverness all the way to Russia.

LEE: Let's hear some excerpts from Ginny's testimony.

* * * * *

_VOICE OF GINNY WEASLEY: I'm somewhat relieved this day has come, honestly. Even though I understand that many of you will be skeptical about that. For over five years now I've been protected from having to face the people who suffered as a result of my stupidity. I was told, first by Professor Dumbledore, and then by a loving family, that I couldn't think of myself as responsible for what happened during my first year at Hogwarts, that I was the victim of powerful dark magic. But the fact is, it got its power from my own self-pity and kept its power from my cowardice in keeping it secret when I knew the right thing to do was to reveal what was happening. I should have been braver then, and I should have been braver afterwards, admitted what I had done. I didn't, because at first I was too frightened of what people would think, and it was too awful a set of memories to have to relive. Then later, I convinced myself that I was a different person from the silly eleven-year-old girl who made that awful mistake, why should I take the fall for her? Which wasn't very Gryffindor of me. . . ._

* * * * *

LEE: Did she approach you personally, after her testimony?

JUSTIN: Before, actually. She beckoned me over and said she had a prepared statement which was, quote, "probably all bollocks," but that she wanted to talk to me first.

LEE: And what she said then was...?

JUSTIN: Private, mostly. I can say, she told me she had already talked to Penelope Clearwater and that Hermione knew about it all along, since Harry and Ron were hardly going to keep it from her. And I told Ginny that I thought she had had shown what she was really made of enough times in the last couple of years. And later on, after the statement and the questioning, I assured her that her speech wasn't all bollocks, it was only mostly bollocks, which was well above average for these hearings. [Laughter]. But, seriously, it was a good speech. And I had to admit to myself, if I had been in a similar situation, I would have found it terribly hard to go about confessing it.

LEE: Not to mention, that she still has the memories, still feels the aftereffects of being possessed by Riddle. I know she doesn't drink at all, for example, which is almost a hanging offense if you're a Weasley, and I bet it's because she doesn't want to have happen to her, what happens to so many drinkers: waking up in the morning with hours missing from her life, not knowing what she did or what happened to her the night before.

JUSTIN: Yes, I can imagine.

LEE: Let's turn back to Lucius Malfoy now. He definitely went directly to Russia?

JUSTIN: He definitely went directly to Russia, and is in all likelihood still there, though he hasn't shown himself in public. He had plenty of contacts there; he'd been Voldemort's lead recruiter in Eastern Europe, that's how Dolohov ended up here for example.

LEE: Snape Diary again?

JUSTIN: Yes.

LEE: And you ended up pursuing Malfoy in Russia.

JUSTIN: I would hardly put it that way. I was part of a Ministry embassy which went there for a number of purposes, one of which, pretty far down the list honestly, was to present an extradition request. The Russians were polite, they told us on an official level that they had no reason to believe that Malfoy was even in their country, and they told us privately that they understood we had to make the request, but there was no chance they would extradite him. The pureblood movement is still very strong there, and even a rumor that the goverment was considering extradition would – there would be a pureblood uprising, or so they fear. On the other hand, they said they would make sure Malfoy stayed quiet, wouldn't be allowed to make any mischief for our government. And they've kept their word on that so far as I can tell.

LEE: I like to imagine him stubble-bearded, wearing tattered robes, swilling vodka, with a sign around his neck saying "WILL CURSE YOUR ENEMIES FOR FOOD", but that's probably too much to hope for.

JUSTIN: I'm afraid so. He's lost all his money, he'll never be cock-of-the-walk, but again, there are a lot of wealthy and reactionary purebloods who probably think of him as a martyr and are glad to have him to dinner. On the other hand, though, when I went, I had a chance to talk with other Russians, besides the government folk. And among the younger witches and wizards, I was very gratified to learn that there were a number who had listened to the Portius hearings, who found them very revealing, and some congratulated me for taking part in cleaning up after the Death Eaters. So Russia isn't the pureblood paradise that it might have been when Lucius Malfoy first went there, and it's probably going to become even less so as the younger generation comes into power.

LEE: Now speaking of young and old Russia, you said you met an interesting figure from the old generation.

JUSTIN: Yes, I thought I just had to tell this story. We were going through the diplomatic gauntlet, and greeting all these mostly old or middle-aged men, and there standing behind them was a very, very old man, obviously over a hundred, with a long white beard, who was clowning it up as if -- I really don't know how to describe it – it was as if he were doing a parody of a mime, tossing his limbs about, making grotesque faces and gestures behind everybody's back, then looking completely triumphant and satisfied whenever anybody made any expression of annoyance. But he wasn't the court jester, he was a very well dressed, obviously wealthy wizard, and nobody seemed willing to order him to stop. All that anybody would say was "Yes, yes, Grigory," and "That's enough, Grigory." And I asked my Russian counterpart about him, and he said, "Oh, pay no attention to old Grigory, he's been a clown all his life." I looked at the old man again, and suddenly it hit me like a bludger to the stomach; I'd studied Russian history, I'd seen photos from the Czarist era, I asked "Is that Grigory Rasputin?" "Why, yes; don't tell me, Mr. Finch-Fletchley, that you memorized the names and faces of the entire wizarding council before you came?" You see, he had no idea what a notorious figure Rasputin was in the non-magical world, or maybe he had an idea, but just never thought it significant or worth bothering about what Rasputin had done to "Muggle" Russia.

LEE: I have to confess, the name doesn't mean anything to me.

JUSTIN: Well, where to begin... In the period before the first world war, Rasputin was a monk, or I guess we'd have to say, posed as a monk – I'll just give the story as it would read in the non-magical history books. One of the young princes of Russia, in the time before World War I, suffered from leukemia, which was incurable and always fatal then. But this strange monk, Grigory Rasputin, would pray over the child, and he would have a miraculous recovery, and the Czar and Czarina thanked him and blessed him and rewarded him, and then the boy would have a relapse, and Rasputin would come in again, and cure him, and then... the same cycle, over and over. But the royal family still had faith in him, even asked him for political advice. And in the meantime, rumors spread that this monk was having orgies in his apartment, was having young teen girls delivered to him for deflowering, all sorts of monstrous stories. So a group of Russian nobles decided he was a dangerous embarrassment to the state and the monarchy, they had to do away with him. Well, they tried. And tried. They fed him poisoned meals, and he asked for more. They stabbed him twenty times, went off to wash their hands, and found he'd gotten up and was walking around the grounds. They finally shot him in the head, tied him up with rope and dumped him in the river.

Well. Obviously, here was a wizard playing what he thought was the most splendidly hysterical practical joke on these Muggle rubes. Toying with the life of a dying child and his desperate parents. Leading them closer to war and revolution with his maniac advice, which was being listened to because they thought he was a miracle worker who had been sent _by God_, hah hah hah! And the attitude I found, in most of the Russian council, was still, "Oh, that Grigory, what can you do about someone like that." I suggested that putting him in a magically sealed cage and making him experience the pains of leukemia first hand might be a start, and they were all shocked at my vicious brutality towards the poor old man.

LEE: I'm going to guess that this was the end of your glorious diplomatic career.

JUSTIN: Well, I still work for Foreign Affairs, but I'm probably going to be behind a desk for the forseeable future.

LEE: We'll be back with Justin Finch-Fletchley after this short break.

* * * * *

LEE: Justin, you talked earlier of how much catch-up you had to do about wizarding law. What sorts of things struck you most?

JUSTIN: What I found most surprising, I suppose, most – most removed from my experience and upbringing in the UK, was how personally oriented wizarding law was. I mean, until very recently, wizarding law had no category for anything like "crimes against the state" or "crimes against public morals" in the abstract, crimes were all crimes against individual witches or wizards, what you did to them. And there was no recognition of any special obligations or special privileges due to your position, such as a position in government – even law enforcement, Aurors, weren't an exception to that, officially they don't have any powers that ordinary citizens don't have.

LEE: Did it make you feel more of outsider, having to learn this odd old system?

JUSTIN: [Pause] Yes, I suppose it did. I was used to certain ideas and assumptions about law and government which apply in the UK which turn out not to apply – at least, not to have taken root so deeply, in Wizarding Britain. The UK has a bureaucratic structure, like all modern nations, where there's a hierarchy of offices, and you follow the fellow above you because of his position in the hierarchy, not because you accepted him as your superior on some personal level. And when I first entered this world, it seemed similar – we have a Ministry of Magic, with its Departments and sub-Departments, and so on.

LEE: You know, these institutions are really of quite recent vintage. Everybody of our grandfather's generation grew up without all that structure.

JUSTIN: We did not get to that point in History of Magic, unfortunately. [Laughter] And in a way that was an advantage for the Portius Commission, this lack of the bureaucratic mindset, because it was quite rare – this was one of the things that surprised me most, that we didn't have one Death Eater after another coming before us and pleading 'I was only following orders.' In a court of this type in the non-magical world, that's the first thing you expect.

LEE: You could write this up to Pureblood Pride in some cases; the leading darks of that crew would have felt, their number was up anybody, no matter how they pled, they weren't going to add an additional humiliation by making themselves appear as if they were simply functionaries acting without any will of their own.

JUSTIN: No doubt. But I also think things are more – again, more personally oriented in the Wizarding world than among non-magicals. You have loyalty to people, not institutions. Nobody really felt like defending "The Union of Wizarding Britain" against a rebellion, nobody even saw it in those terms. They felt like defending their families, or friends, or – perhaps if we had had a Minister the people felt more attached to than Scrimgeour, they might have fought for him. I think the wizarding state and its bureaucratic structure is really seen as a kind of sideshow by most people. You could even make the case that the Wizarding Union of Britain isn't even a 'state' in the modern sense – in the way it's defined by the political theorists. A state is supposed to have a monopoly of force, and how can you have that when every now and then the gods, the wizarding powers, whatever -- throw up somebody like Voldemort, who is too powerful to be brought down.

LEE: Let's talk now about some of the efforts which were being made to take him down that last year. Some of them have _not_ been made public until now, including two that involved yourself – all three if you count the one that was taken up by the Portius Commission. Now that ten-year secrecy statute has expired, why don't you tell us about them.

JUSTIN: Alright, which one should we start with?

LEE: Oh, how about how you were going to blow up the Ministry of Magic?

JUSTIN: Yes, I should have known you'd want to start with that episode. [Laughter.] Well, then. I have to start with a bit of non-magical military thinking. The UK military, like basically all of the developed nations, thinks one of the primary targets in war is what they call "command and control" -- the places that the orders come from. Destroy these, it's thought, and you render the enemy effectively headless. So if open war broke out between magical and non, or if it looked as if the wizarding resistance to Voldemort was utterly defeated, and he was about to turn his attention to the UK, the obvious first target, from their perspective, was the Ministry of Magic.

LEE: Which really was not the prime command center for Voldemort.

JUSTIN: No. But we couldn't find Voldemort, and the military people basically settled on the Ministry as target number one because, well, as in the old joke, "the light was better there."

LEE: I don't know that one.

JUSTIN: Oh, I thought everybody – Well, a man loses his keys on one side of the street, and his friends find him searching under a lamp-post on the other side of the street, they ask him "why are you looking here when you lost them there?" and he says --

LEE: "Because the light is better here." Got it.

JUSTIN: So the Ministry -- we knew where it was, obviously. And that presented problem number one. It's in the middle of London, they couldn't carpet bomb the site. But if they could infiltrate it, they might be able to plant a bomb which would decimate the Ministry without, hopefully, doing too much damage to the people and structures above. The problem was finding the infiltrator. Non-magicals can't get in. People like Kingsley would be much too easily recognized.

LEE: And they couldn't use Polyjuice, because...

JUSTIN: Because after Harry, Hermione and Ron had used Polyjuice to stage their snatch-and-grab of the locket horcrux, the Death Eaters took countermeasures. An impostor would have been exposed. So what was needed, as the bomb-planter, was a witch or wizard who was available to the UK military at a moment's notice, and who didn't have a particularly well-known face Which basically narrowed the candidate list down to, well, me.

LEE: But they knew who you were. Not to bring up painful memories --

JUSTIN: Or non-memories.

LEE: Or memories of non-memories. But they found you once, so...?

JUSTIN: They found me by location, because they had lists of floo connections, not because anybody recognized me personally. There wouldn't be pictures of me at the Ministry entrance. So as my military handlers put it, "we may assume with a reasonable degree of confidence that they do not perceive you as a threat."

LEE: Ah yes, _they _could make that assumption with serene confidence, couldn't they. Did they also tell you, "You may well die in carrying out this mission, but that is a sacrifice we are willing to make"?

JUSTIN: That rather went without saying. [Laughter.]

LEE: So you volunteered? You were "volunteered"?

JUSTIN: I volunteered. Very reluctantly. Because I knew that it wasn't just going to be Yaxley and Thicknesse and other Death Eaters who would be killed, it would be Arthur Weasley and Robert MacMillan and dozens of blameless clerks and secretaries. And I was told, repeatedly: you can't give warnings to the people you want spared, you don't know who _they _will tell, and who those people will tell in turn, et cetera. That was how the original Gunpowder Plot unraveled, so if I was going to be the wizard Guy Fawkes, it had to avoid the downfall of the original Guy. When Ernie found out about this, that I was going to do this without warning his dad, he didn't speak to me for more than a year. I can scarcely blame him, can I?

LEE: Even though you would likely have been blown up with them?

JUSTIN: That would have depended. They couldn't have an electronic countdown device, obviously too much magical interference, so they were working on a way to have a purely mechanical delay trigger that would let me plant the thing and get out before it went up. But that turned out to be a huge engineering challenge which they hadn't solved by the time the war blessedly ended anyway, without any need for heroic martyrdom slash mass murder on my part. The plan as it stood was that I activate the trigger as soon as I was in.

LEE: Mass murder?

JUSTIN: At the time, I could fairly easily pass it off to myself as a, as one of those dreadful necessities of war. The lesser of two evils, clearly, if the alternative was allowing Voldemort a free run. And if you accepted the assumption that this really would put a serious crimp in Voldemort's plans, which wasn't certain. Then a few years later, came the suicide bombings which brought down the World Trade Center, and that put what I was doing, what I was going to do, in a much more... [Pause]. You know what I mean, I could hardly help thinking then, 'Isn't this what these men were saying to themselves, about the need to confront the wicked enemy somehow, however they could?'

LEE: Justin, I really don't think it was the same thing.

JUSTIN: Well.

LEE: Who else knew? Kingsley must have known about this.

JUSTIN: Sure.

LEE: He obviously didn't think of it as a war crime against the wizarding world. He appointed you to the Portius Commission.

JUSTIN: No, it wasn't a crime, not on my part anyway because – here we get into a bit of legalistic casuistry – officially, I would have been hypothetically acting on behalf of a legitimate government, the U.K., attacking a legitimate military target of the nation with which they were hypothetically at war, so I wasn't on the hook.

LEE: Which would mean, though, that you were being classed as 'one of them' – as under U.K. authority – rather than 'one of us,' part of the wizarding resistance.

JUSTIN: Yes, and I didn't like that implication.

LEE: Mme. Portius didn't know?

JUSTIN: Kingsley said I was not to tell Mme. Portius. He was virtually certain she would have vetoed my appointment and called me up for investigation, and it all would have come out in a very inconvenient way at a very inconvenient time. It would have given the Death-Eater sympathizers this big, shiny stick to beat us all with.

LEE: It would likely have brought down the Shacklebolt government.

JUSTIN: Yes.

LEE: And now you're working for the Ministry you once had such sweeping renovation plans for. [Laughter.] Did any of your colleagues know?

JUSTIN: My superior, Mr. Clemens. I told him before he hired me, because otherwise it wouldn't be quite fair to him, when the story finally came out, as I knew it would eventually. Everyone would look at him as the man who hired the fox to work in the henhouse. I was very surprised by how mildly he took it. He just said to me, "You'd be surprised how many of us have given serious thought to blowing this place up." [Laughter.]

LEE: We'll be back with Justin Finch-Fletchley, to talk about a second act of resistance which was planned but never carried out: the Ravenclaw Plot.

* * * * *

A/N: I've altered the dialogue in Chapter Two, to be consistent with what Justin says here about keeping the "Guy Fawkes" plan secret. It only occurred to me in the middle of writing the dialogue here that they would have been anxious not to let the public know about the plot in general or Justin's part in particular at a time when the new government wasn't fully stable.


	4. Chapter 4

LEE: We've had Gryffindors hunting down horcruxes, our guest the Hufflepuff prepared to destroy the Death Eater Ministry, now some of the exploits of the brave Ravenclaws.

JUSTIN: They were certainly brave, though whether to call it an 'exploit' is a matter of taste and definition. And there was a Slytherin involved here too. The story is basically this.... Daphne Greengrass, of Slytherin, and Anthony Goldstein of Ravenclaw were friendly before the Death Eater takeover of Hogwarts, and stayed friendly afterwards.

LEE: Just friendly?

JUSTIN: Probably more. Or at least it would have been more, under different circumstances. Close enough, at any rate, that Daphne kept Anthony informed on the gossip she was privy to, which included some of the comings and goings of Death Eaters. Most crucially, it included the news of who was about to be marked.

LEE: Did Daphne know that Anthony had been in Dumbledore's Army?

JUSTIN: Yes.

LEE: So, this would have constituted passing state secrets to the enemy. Which had to be a capital offense. So why did she do it?

JUSTIN: We never got to ask her, because her family fled the country and never returned. If I had to guess, I would say, she sympathized with the resistance and thought this might somehow be passed on and help them in some way.

LEE: Another alternative is that she was on Voldemort's side and wanted to impress Anthony, win him over by showing that she was in contact with the important people.

JUSTIN: But nobody who knew Daphne ever described her as the kind of silly girl who would do something like that because it was a cool thing to show off for a cute boy this way. Well. Picking up the story. Daphne told Anthony that the next induction ceremony would be for one of their fellow students, Vincent Crabbe. Which surprised him at the time, because he was sure that the first Hogwarts student to get that honor would be Draco Malfoy.

LEE: And passing Draco over would have been another way of rubbing it in to Lucius, from Voldemort's point of view.

JUSTIN: Especially passing him over in favor of one of his own former... personal subordinates.

LEE: I think the technical term you're looking for is "arselickers."

JUSTIN: [Laughing] Well Anthony shares this knowledge with Terry, his best mate. So they were joking about – that's how it all started, just as a joke, what if they put something in Crabbe's dinner so that he threw up over Voldemort. No, even better, put something in it so that he actually exploded, and showered Voldemort with his guts. No, what about... And then they started thinking, what if we could actually do this, do it right, it might actually be a way to get rid of Voldemort. They had just had a solution to the problem we had at Downing Street, how to find Voldemort, had the answer handed to them. Since Voldemort's presence was an indispensible element of the marking ceremony.

LEE: Sorry to interrupt when the story's getting good, but since probably none of our listeners have heard about this, explain how you know about it.

JUSTIN: It came out when Anthony, Terry, Padma Patil and Michael Corner testified at a closed session of the Portius Commission.

LEE: Which we will get to. So...

JUSTIN: So they thought about potions, poisonous potions, which could be injected under the skin, in the place on the left arm where the Dark Mark would be inscribed, and which would be released by, either by the magic or by the heat of the marking. Which is why they called in Padma and Michael, who were very good at potions and who had also been part of Dumbledore's Army.

LEE: There was another Ravenclaw though, who was also good at potions --

JUSTIN: Right.

LEE: -- but who they apparently did not approach.

JUSTIN: Luna Lovegood. And they explained at the hearing. It wasn't because they doubted her loyalty, that thought never crossed their minds. They said – primarily Anthony said, he just couldn't think of her as being part of a secret project, with life-and-death consequences. Not so much that they were afraid she would blurt out the secret, though that did cross their minds, at least one of them thought it was a serious possibility that they would be in the middle of a potions lesson and Luna would suddenly say "Oh, Terry, wouldn't this troll blood mix be useful for our extracurricular project?"

LEE: I bet it was Corner who said that.

JUSTIN: We all love to dump on poor Michael, don't we? After all, he's The Boy who was Mean to Ginny Weasley [Laughter]. I think it's past time for the wizarding world to forgive him for that. Actually – well, no I'm not going to say who it was. In any case, it was more because they thought it would be a disconcerting experience having her in with them while they were working on this deadly, dangerous matter, given her habit of, coming out with these, ah, surprising and confounding declarations.

LEE: "I don't think we should continue today, the wrackspurts are too active"?

JUSTIN: Something like that, and they thought it would make working conditions a touch difficult. As it turns out, they were able to put together a very ingenious mixture, without Luna's assistance. They were inspired, if that's the word, by the section in the seventh-year manual which was there to deter the overly curious experimenters; the part that contained all the warnings about what not to do, which ingredients you should never combine, especially under this or that kind of heat. And from that starting point they just needed to use some imagination, do some extrapolations, perform the bubble-head charm and do some experiments on rats, and voila, they had a poison which was instantly deadly to anybody nearby – which Voldemort would have to be, he would be leaning over Crabbe to perform the marking. The best part was, since it involved a combination whose ingredients were basically harmless in themselves, and only deadly when combined and activated under heat, they wouldn't be detected with a magical sweep. The heat generated by the _Morsmordre_ itself would do the damage.

LEE: That still leaves the problem of feeding the ingredients to Crabbe.

JUSTIN: That was a major difficulty. They came up with a number of plans which basically ended with stunning him, planting the ingredients, and obliviating him. The primary difficulty was in getting him alone. But the plan never got that far, because Hector Greengrass found out – well, he didn't find out that the Ravenclaws had these assassination plans, but he found out that his daughter was telling them about matters in the... of special concern to the Dark Lord. And he panicked.

LEE: Understandably.

JUSTIN: This part comes from Snape's diary, because Mr. Greengrass went to Professor-- Headmaster Snape, begging for permission to take his daughter out of Hogwarts. Snape couldn't or wouldn't grant his request without an explanation, and so he forced it out of him. Snape describes Mr. Greengrass as "obviously frantic with terror," for himself and his family, but Snape insisted, either tell him there and now or have the both of them take a trip to see Voldemort personally and have him do the questioning.

LEE: Was he bluffing?

JUSTIN: I don't know. Possibly. But he couldn't just let the Greengrasses go without finding out what was behind this mysterious request. Temperamentally, if there was one thing Snape was greedy for, it was information, he wouldn't want to let a source of it slip by him without a struggle. That was just ingrained in him, one of the habits a spy has to keep. And he would have told himself that he couldn't do the job Dumbledore had set for him unless he knew as much as it was possible to know. So, bluff or not, it worked, Greengrass told him about Daphne's little indiscretion, and Snape said he would let them out, would even help provide a cover story if Voldemort ever inquired after them, how he had a job offer in France. As it turned out, he never did, never considered it important enough, I suppose, that one family moved and a student transferred to Beauxbatons.

LEE: Why would this have stopped the Ravenclaws from going through with their plans for Crabbe?

JUSTIN: Because they didn't know yet – whoever Daphne's source was, hadn't told her yet, what was the date of the marking. And the potions were very time-dependent, they couldn't be left, left in Crabbe, for more than a day without losing their potency.

LEE: No, it's never a good idea to leave stuffed Crabbe out too long.

[Pause]

JUSTIN: I think – I don't think I'll comment on that.

LEE: Now you say that what happened next was covered during the private hearing, so we'll hear an excerpt from that in a moment. First, though: why wasn't it a public hearing?

JUSTIN: There would have been no hearing at all, we wouldn't have known anything of the story at all, if it hadn't been for Snape's diary, and his comments were so brief and elliptical it wasn't clear what had happened. In other words, there wasn't anything like a_ prima facie _criminal case against the Ravenclaws, so there seemed no call for a public inquisition. The statute of secrecy on the testimony has just expired though, so we can talk about it now.

LEE: Now in this reading we'll hear from Anthony and Madame Portius?

JUSTIN: Right. _In propria persona._

* * * * *

_PORTIUS: ...and what happened after you discovered Miss Greengrass was missing from Charms class?_

_ANTHONY GOLDSTEIN: We didn't think much about it, it was only one class after all. But when class was over, Professor Flitwick said that I was wanted in Headmaster Snape's office, immediately. Naturally that had me worried, but the fact that it was only me, that Terry, Padma and Michael weren't being call in too, gave me a little hope that this wasn't about the assassination plan. Well, that turned out to be wishful thinking. The Headmaster didn't even ask me to sit down, he just started by saying, "I understand you have expressed an interest in the marking of Death Eaters, Mr. Goldstein." _

_PORTIUS: And you answered?_

_GOLDSTEIN: I honestly don't know what I said to him then, and I doubt that even a Pensieve would help, because that only works if you had a functioning consciousness at the time. I must have mumbled something, because Snape said "Come now, Mr. Goldstein, speak up. Surely you don't feel that this is a matter for embarassment? The glorious prospect of making an unbreakable vow of lifelong service to the Dark Lord himself?" And he talked for a long time – an excruciatingly long time – about what it meant to be a Death Eater. That your life belonged the Dark Lord, and that carrying out any order of his, in no matter how seemingly slight a matter, was the only purpose of your life until you either succeeded – in which case you must never dare to expect any thanks or reward – or you failed, in which case you must never dare to protest, even within your own mind, against whatever punishment he decided on, in his sovereign wisdom. That your greatest happiness would be discovering some threat to the Dark Lord or to his plans, and being given the privilege of crushing any presumptuous fool who dared to offer such a threat, making him curse his parents for giving him life._

_I was just about on the verge of either drawing my wand or taking flight, even though I knew the odds were very, very badly against me either way. But Professor Snape lowered his voice then, and said to me that if I had been a Gryffindor he might suspect I had "some mad plan" in mind when I asked Miss Greengrass these questions, but that since I was a Ravenclaw, he was sure I was intelligent enough to decide for myself whether I really wanted to involve myself in Death Eater ceremonies. And then he dismissed me. I couldn't account for this, I really couldn't. If he didn't know about the plot, why did he bring me in and do his best to frighten me? And if that wasn't his best, I hope – excuse me, I'm grateful -- that I never encountered him at his best. And if he did know anything, how could I have possibly gotten off with just a warning? Later on, of course, we learned what Professor Snape was doing, and it made a lot more sense. _

_PORTIUS: For the record, it does not appear that Professor Snape knew there was an assassination plot revolving around the marking. He almost certainly did not know who were the participants. _

_GOLDSTEIN: I'm very glad he didn't._

_PORTIUS: Did you consider, Mr. Goldstein – did any of you consider, when you were planning this assassination – that it was entirely extra-legal, that you had placed yourself outside the protections given by the laws of war?_

_GOLDSTEIN: No, Ma'am. That didn't really enter our considerations._

_PORTIUS: You realize, that you and your friends were not legal combatants, you were not under the authority of the Order of the Phoenix or any other organized resistance movement?_

_GOLDSTEIN: Again, Madame Chairman, this just wasn't something that concerned us. We were trying to rid England of a vicious dictator. _

_PORTIUS: I realize that, and I admire your courage and ingenuity. But if you had been brought to trial, I would not have been able to help you, to defend your actions on any legal basis._

_[Pause]_

_GOLDSTEIN: With all due respect, Ma'am, I really don't think, if it came to that, that your intervention would have... well, it wasn't something we were counting on. We weren't even counting on getting a trial. We thought it was more likely, if we were caught, that our parents would have received letters regretfully informing them we had all been killed in an unfortunate incident in the Forbidden Forrest. Trampled by wild hippogriffs, say, or eaten by acromantula..._

_PORTIUS: Trampled by hippogriffs? What an odd notion...._

* * * * *

LEE: Madame Portius didn't get the joke, did she?

JUSTIN: No. Though anybody who had been at Hogwarts in those years would have.

LEE: It's funny to think, nobody knew a tenth of what Ron and Harry and Hermione got up to and into in those years, with polyjuice and basilisks and time turners and on and on and on, but absolutely everybody knew what our heroes did for Divination homework. That by itself would have made them legends.

JUSTIN: We used to look forward so eagerly to the latest installment, like it was a WWN daytime serial.

LEE: "Deaths of Destiny, or: The Perils of Poor Potter." And on the other hand, Anthony seemed quite flummoxed by Madame Portius' questions about legal and illegal combatants.

JUSTIN: He certainly was. Madame Portius had a absolute and unalterable attachment to The Law, and that made her seem obsessive and fanatical to people who didn't share that outlook. That was simply who she was. It was what let her stand up to the Death Eaters, and it was also what made her take the line she did with Anthony and the others.

LEE: Would the plan have worked? Leaving horcrux immortality aside.

JUSTIN: Professor Slughorn thought it would have. He told them to burn all their notes, and had the book which originally inspired them recalled.

LEE: We'll be right back with Justin Finch-Fletchley. You're listening to _Many Rivers_ here on WWN.

* * * * *

LEE: We're back, talking to Justin Finch-Fletchley. Justin, you have another secret that's been kept for the last ten years, involving Downing Street's plans for the worst-case scenario.

JUSTIN. Right. The worst-case scenario would be Voldemort in complete control of wizarding Britain, having finished off the Order of the Phoenix and all other organized opposition. And the Blair government had determined, if this happened, Voldemort must be destroyed no matter what the cost. NATO was even brought in at this point, which means the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, all had signed off on this. They were certain that the non-magical world would be the next target, and the nightmare, for them, was the prospect of fighting a protracted war against an enemy who could nullify all their standard strategies of warfare, all their technological prowess. Because how do you fight someone who can control your mind, can disappear at will, and so on. So long as he was still occupied by wizarding resistance, the situation was barely tolerable. But once that was removed, again, destroy him at any cost.

LEE: And there are probably still some listeners to this program who have no idea what that would mean in practice, given the kinds of weapons at their disposal.

JUSTIN: I suppose pretty much everybody of our age or thereabouts knows full well what that means. And of course I also knew, at the time. My father and I were in on the planning, and the worst-case scenario did involve using nuclear weapons over a populated area, if it could be ascertained with certainty that Voldemort was at the location.

LEE: And on May 5, 1998, you had ascertained with certainty that Voldemort was at Hogwarts.

JUSTIN: Kingsley had ascertained it. But I didn't know, when Kingsley grabbed me, where we were going. And that was – he apparated in to Downing Street HQ, and all he said to me was, "there's a battle shaping up, we need everybody we can get," and he took me via portkey. And just before the portkey activated I could hear the military people screaming at Kingsley "wait, wait, WHERE? Tell us WHERE!" He didn't tell them.

LEE: Deliberately.

JUSTIN: Deliberately. And I was confused. Because the planning was very clear: if Kingsley knew where it was, if he was in the fight and it seemed hopeless, a magical homing signal would go back to Downing Street, and that would tell the UK, NATO people to launch the missiles at that location. We'd been over it, practiced it dozens of times. They were certain that within three minutes at most they could have obliterated an area too large for even Voldemort to apparate out of.

LEE: And yet we know now, that even if a twenty-megaton bomb went off next to old Tom's head, it wouldn't have necessarily ended things.

JUSTIN: But actually, in the event, it would have. Because his last horcrux, the snake familiar, would have been killed along with him. So we might have – I was about to say, "we might have lucked out," but one could scarcely call what would have happened "lucky."

LEE: It depends in part on who you're calling "we" in that thought.

JUSTIN: Not you or I personally, obviously. We would have been atomized.

LEE: The heart of wizarding Britain would have been destroyed. But the non-magical UK wouldn't have come out too badly. Aside from the panic caused by a nuclear weapon suddenly going off in the middle of Scotland,

JUSTIN: And there would have many deaths from radiation, from fallout.

LEE: But their civilization would have stayed essentially intact. What would have been left of ours, if Hogwarts was gone?

JUSTIN: And there's the thing that I have to confess, still separates the purebloods from the newbloods. Hogwarts, Hogwarts, hoggy-hoggy Hogwarts. That was the first thing that came to your mind, like it was the first thing that came to Kingsley's mind: not that you and I and he and all our friends and teachers and allies and all the people of Hogsmeade would have been dead, but that Hogwarts would be gone, and that absolutely could not be allowed to happen, no matter what. We were – Kingsley was willing to see thousands of witches and wizards die, if it meant ridding the world of Voldemort, just as Blair was read to sacrifice a large non-magical city. But what Kingsley could not allow was the destruction of this sacred site.

LEE: I can't think of any – anybody who grew up in the wizarding world, who would.

JUSTIN: You were about to say "any wizard," weren't you?

LEE: I suppose I was. Sorry; you know I think that "purity of blood" is nonsense.

JUSTIN: I know, Lee. But still, automatically, "any wizard" to you invokes an image of a pureblood wizard, not a newblood. And that's just the way our minds are wired, I suppose, just as for people who grow up in a culture dominated by straight white males, when you read some sentence with the word "people say" or "people think," your mind offers a picture of straight white males.

LEE: Even if you're a gay white male?

JUSTIN: Even then. Blood-talk may be nonsense, but upbringing isn't nonsense, it does matter. You were brought up being told all the time about this place, this place that every witch and wizard whose name meant anything in all of British history had passed through, the place which was responsible for the passing on of magic from one generation to the next. As you just said, the "heart of wizarding Britain." The place where magic as you knew it was born, and magic itself might die if it didn't have a home at Hogwarts. To me, when I found out about it, I thought, wonderful, I'm going to the wizarding Eton. To you, it was more like the wizarding Mecca. I've tried to look at it that way, to imagine how a Muslim would feel about a plan that involved sacrificing Mecca in order to save the world from Hitler or Stalin taking it over, and they would also say, "let Hitler and Stalin win, they'll be brought down eventually, but Mecca can't possibly be replaced."

LEE: I didn't think of it as Mecca, Justin. I know George and Fred didn't. You don't set off firecrackers and create swamps in Mecca.

JUSTIN: All right, not literally Mecca. But you notice that even the swamp became something legendary, a tale of heroic defiance to be passed down and emulated. Hogwarts does that somehow, it turns even acts of irreverence into semi-sacred places. Or at least it seems that way to most witches and wizards in retrospect, once we're well out of it and don't have to do homework. The homework drops out of most people's memories, I've noticed.

LEE: And you didn't quite grasp this at the time, ten years ago.

JUSTIN: No. And Kingsley had to make me promise, that I could not tell anybody in the wizarding world. Bad enough the UK was looking to blow up the Ministry, but the Ministry doesn't mean anything compared to Hogwarts. Kingsley thought if it got out that the Muggles had been ready to destroy Hogwarts, that it would cause an unimaginable backlash, that it could make Lucius Malfoy the next Prime Minister.

LEE: Why reveal it now, then? Aren't you worried about the backlash anymore?

JUSTIN: Not as much. It's history now. And we've had those ten years in which people on both sides have goten better used to the idea of living with one another, or at least living on the same island. We know that we don't have to be enemies. The UK certainly hasn't made any aggressive moves against wizards, doesn't have any plans to destroy us or enslave us.

LEE: And because of your status, both as a newblood wizard and the son of a UK political figure, you're one of the very few people who can testify to that from personal knowledge.

JUSTIN: And I have to hope that I've established enough credibility here, as a "real wizard," that my testimony will be trusted.

LEE: As it should be.

JUSTIN: Thanks.

LEE: As we promised, we're going to take some floo calls now for Justin. Our first call... well, all the way from the Antipodes. Brad from Down Under, spiffing of you to give your time to us Pommies, what's your question for Justin?

_BRAD: Justin, what are your thoughts on the status quo as it now exists, the separation of the Muggle and Wizard worlds by virtue of the enforcement of the Statute of Secrecy? How long can this situation continue to exist, given the increasing numbers of Muggleborn - excuse me, Newbloods - that enter Wizarding society every year, with their Muggle families in the know? Do you think the statute is a good idea? What do you think is likely to happen should the secret one day be 'outed'? What would the UK government do? I imagine the general public would NOT appreciate their Prime Minister having kept such a secret from them ..._

LEE: A very appropriate set of questions to follow what we've just heard.

JUSTIN: Yes. At this point, I think we're just on the tipping point of it becoming impossible to keep the secret. Both for the reasons the caller quite correctly notes, and because so many people in the UK ministry and military had to be let in on the secret. And the general increase in population not only means more Newbloods who have brothers and sisters and cousins who are in the know, it means more potential for stumbling upon wizarding settlements. Highways are getting closer to Hogwarts. Hikers are criss-crossing it much more often than they did fifty years ago, even ten years ago. But I still think it would be better to keep the separation as long as we can. We've been talking about the wizarding reaction to learning what the UK was ready to do during wartime, but of course there's another side of it; the non-magical world learning that for a time, the British Ministry of Magic was run by people who tortured Muggles for sport.

LEE: And, as Brad says, the revelation that this had been kept a secret...

JUSTIN: And it couldn't be confined to Britain; non-magical people all over the world would quickly realize that if Britain has a magical population, odds are rather good there are more of us all over the world, who've escaped their notice. I'm sure it would be a huge recruiting tool for what they call in America "the religious right."

LEE: And to these groups we are, for all intents and purposes, demons.

JUSTIN: Or the servants of demons. And responsible people on both sides are naturally concerned about this, and they have taken steps to reassure people. I know that if the Statute of Secrecy broke down, Downing Street would release the records of the agreements in place between NATO and the International Confederation of Wizards, which involve unbreakable vows on both sides not to engage in aggression against the other.

LEE: Still, one vote here for maintaining the Statute of Secrecy. Next call is Simon, from Lancaster, your question?

_SIMON: Hi, good show. I wonder, even with the points raised by you and Brad, do the Muggles really have the capacity to attack us, without wizarding assistance? I mean, Hogwarts is still protected from Muggle entry, or even from their knowing it's there. And Durmstrang is even more secretive and more protected. I don't think there's really much to worry about in terms of witch-hunts starting again._

JUSTIN: Yes, that's a fairly widespread response. And I also don't think we're going to have a return to the bad old days either. But as for keeping the existence of Hogwarts a secret, I'm afraid that train has already left the station. And Durmstrang too. Believe me, NATO knows precisely where Durmstrang is. And they made sure that Durmstrang knew that they knew.

LEE: How can technology do what magic can't in this case, when technology – at least, what relies on electricity – can't even function in magic-heavy areas?

JUSTIN: Because technology which relies on electricity can't even function in magic-heavy areas. [Pause.] Got it yet?

LEE: Give me another hint.

JUSTIN: All right... Suppose nobody knew Hogwarts' location at the time I was a first-year, and the UK decided to use me as an unwitting spy, had a tracking device planted on me and tried to follow me to Hogwarts. "Ah HAH," many witches and wizards would say, "silly Muggles, they don't realize their technology doesn't work against magic." But...

LEE: Oh, of course; you would be tracked up until the train came into Hogsmeade, then the signal would stop. And a big red pin would go up on the map they were using, showing the last spot where the device was working.

JUSTIN: And that's the South boundary of Hogwarts/Hogsmeade. You do the same thing, basically, to settle the North, East and West boundaries, and there you have it. It's much like the way astronomers locate black holes; you can't see a black hole, but you can see where odd sorts of events are taking place all around the something you can't see, and these events could only be caused by a black hole.

LEE: Our next floo call is from Sarah in Devon. Go ahead, Sarah.

_SARAH: Hello Lee, hello Justin. _

LEE, JUSTIN: Hello!

_SARAH: Justin, especially after all the testimony we heard about the plans the Death-Eaters had for making Slytherin House their "vanguard party" with special privileges over the rest of us, what do you think of the idea of abolishing Slytherin House?_

LEE: A subject that comes up pretty much every year.

JUSTIN: But with diminishing momentum, it seems. Which is in a way a good thing, because the initial demands were part of a general movement to keep all Slytherins out of politics, to keep them all under a kind of permanent probation, and that never would have worked, would have been a great injustice if it was tried. Still, I've always been in favor of abolition. Not because I think this would banish the darkness or anything of the sort, but the existence of a special house for the ambitious is a recipe for disaster. Let's say you're an otherwise normal boy or girl, who happens to have a strong competitive streak. You're put in Slytherin, where everybody else has that trait, and the only way you're going to get ahead is by out-competing all the most competitive, get-ahead people of your age. It ends up bringing out the very worst in you. You're afraid that if you don't obsessively refine your strategy for getting ahead, if you don't use every ethical loophole that will help you along the way, you inevitably fall behind. And in fact you would fall behind, because the same logic of fear is governing every other student in your house.

LEE: Thank you, Sarah. Next call is from Eleanor in York.

_ELEANOR: Justin, what do you make of the idea of creating hate-speech statutes, making it a crime to call somebody a "mudblood"?_

JUSTIN: Very much against it. For one thing, I treasure my own right to call purebloods all sorts of names [laughter], so it would be quite hypocritical of me to give my own group special protection there. Seriously, I prefer to reserve criminal trials and punishments for more tangible offenses. I can offer an alternative though: shunning. In a community as tightly knit as Wizarding Britain – we're almost like a big small town, by nonmagical standards – this sort of social disapprobation can be very effective.

LEE: Justin, we're just about out of time. Any final thoughts?

JUSTIN: Just that even after all that's happened, I'm still very glad and very proud to have gotten that first owl when I was eleven. And almost twenty years after, there are still days I wonder if it's not a dream.

LEE: Justin, a pleasure as always to talk to you. See you at the next DA reunion,if not sooner.

JUSTIN: Pleasure was all mine.

-END-

_A/N: This last chapter was put together a bit hastily, so apologies in advance for errors or sloppy writing. Thanks to all readers, special thanks to reviewers Gioia, Illyra and madbrad, and especial-special thanks to the latter for his provocative question for Justin._

_The Daphne/Anthony ship was inspired by Antosha's __The Wiser Course, which is an absolute must-read. One version is complete, at SIYE, another is in progress at Phoenixsong dot net._


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